4* 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



1 .T3 

Chap._ Copyright No. 

Shelf. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



TALKS TO YOUNG WOMEN 



BY 



V 

CHARLES H. PARKHURST 




NEW YORK 

TTbe Century Co* 

1897 







Copyright, 1895, by 

The Curtis Publishing Company 

Copyright, 1 89 7, by 

The Century Co. 



The DeVinne Press. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

" Andromaniacs " I 

The Unit of Society 12 

The True Mission of Woman 24 

College Training for Women 36 

Women without the Ballot 47 

Marriage and its Safeguards 59 

The Training of a Child ....... 70 

Compulsion in Child-training 81 

Religion in the Family 92 

The Father's Domestic Headship .' . . . 103 

The Passion of Money-getting 114 

Memories of our Childhood Homes . . . 126 



TALKS TO YOUNG WOMEN 




TALKS TO YOUNG WOMEN 



"ANDROMANIACS" 



NOTHING either very distinct or effective 
can be said of woman, her discipline, duties, 
or opportunities, save as it proceeds from a know- 
ledge of her in her distinctively feminine charac- 
ter. In the following series of articles the interest 
I show in her will be the interest I take in her as 
woman, and I shall fix my attention upon her as 
distinguished from the complementary sex. We 
have been led to believe that neither on the part 
of man nor of woman is there that deep sense of 
differentiation that the circumstances of the case 
1 i 



permit and require. It will be to that matter, 
then, that our attention will at the outset be 
specially directed. 

It is my pleasure as well as my duty to insist, 
in the first instance, upon woman's intrinsic su- 
periority. This predication must be made care- 
fully, and understood as it is intended. There 
are many ways in which the two sexes can be 
compared and contrasted, in some of which the 
one, and in some of which the other, would have 
to be accorded precedence. When, therefore, I 
assert woman's superiority, it requires to be pre- 
mised that I am not thinking of her strength, nor 
of her capabilities of effect, but purely and simply 
of the intrinsic quality of womanly fiber. Quite 
apart from all that she does and the sphere of 
her activities, the question comes upon the mat- 
ter of her personal texture, the refinement of its 
organization, and it is with that only in mind 
that I want to claim for her a clear and easy 
supremacy. 



THE first important suggestion that comes to 
us from the Bible record is that the produc- 
tion of woman was the consummating act of the 
creative week. Whatever opinion we may see 
our way clear to hold upon the doctrine of evo- 
lution, it remains a fact that the first two chapters 



of Genesis mark an orderly progress of creative 
sequence, each step in the history furnishing the 
platform upon which sustained itself a still higher 
and finer exercise of the divine wisdom and power, 
so that each step was the finish of what had pre- 
ceded and the initiative of all that came after. 
It is in that character, then, that we are obliged 
to construe the final act of the creative week, 
and to find in the production of woman the 
climax of God's creative energy. When he had 
finished her he stopped, knowing of nothing better 
nor higher that he could design. 

The profound reading of the first two chapters 
of Genesis compels to the highest possible inter- 
pretation of womanhood. And this is in accord 
with the impression that is yielded by the Scrip- 
tures in their entirety, that, while man is gifted 
with those properties that make him a more overt 
and conspicuous figure in the history of God's 
people, yet when it is a matter of personality 
carried to the highest and most delicate degree 
of organization and refinement, it is woman upon 
whom the Scriptures regularly put the stamp of 
divine preferment. And the Scriptures have not 
been read for hundreds and thousands of years 
without the above sentiment having become in 
very wide degree an element in the general esti- 
mate. Not all, but a great deal, of what is known 
as gallantry is a silent eulogy which man yields 



to the queenliness of God's favorite sex. The 
same sentiment asserts itself, although in a man- 
ner not always understood, in the heavier penalty 
which woman is publicly required to pay when 
she sacrifices her womanhood. It is easy to say 
that the sin is as much his as hers, and that social 
ostracism for her and social toleration for him is 
an injustice ; and so in a way it is. At the same 
time, in that discrimination there is an uncon- 
scious tribute paid to woman, for the dishonor 
can be only as deep as the honor is high from 
which it has declined. That estimate of woman, 
which is a distinctly scriptural one, lies very deeply 
intrenched in the masculine mind, and there is 
nothing more becoming to man than that he shall 
continue to cherish that estimate, and nothing 
more to the advantage of woman than that she 
should carry herself in a way to encourage it. 



MORE important, however, than the question 
whether woman is or is not distinctively 
more finely organized than man is the other 
matter of the essential disparity of the two sexes. 
" Male and female created he them." That is 
the basal fact of the entire matter. As we should 
say in arithmetic, the two cannot be reduced to 
a common denominator. The words just quoted 
from Genesis date from a good way back ; still, 






their intention is pretty clear, and the progress of 
events the world through has rather corroborated 
than refuted the substantial accuracy of old bib- 
lical estimates. 

Sex is not an accident of personality, but is an 
element that is constituent in every thread and 
fiber of it. If a man is a man the flavor of man- 
hood will permeate him in his entirety. If a 
woman is a woman the flavor of womanhood will 
permeate her in her entirety. The Mosaic ex- 
pression just cited means that to the mind of the 
Creator each of these two stood for a distinct 
type of personal existence in all that goes to 
compose personal existence. The instant you 
begin to annualize the idea of sex, and limit the 
distinction to difference of physical organization, 
you cut into the tissue of the deepest part of the 
entire matter ; and unfortunately there is at pres- 
ent a very strong tendency in that direction. 
I regard this as the key to the entire position. 
If the reader of this will ask the next woman 
whom he or she may meet whether she considers 
that her womanliness is a quality that extends 
into the domain of her intellectual perceptions 
and of her moral and spiritual appreciations, the 
chances are that the reply which comes back will 
be either negative or non-committal, probably 
the latter. 



THE intention of Scripture is clear also from 
the method in which it handles representa- 
tives of the womanly sex. Those women upon 
whom it puts the stamp of divine distinction and 
approval are women, with scarcely an exception, 
whose womanhood is realized to be a pervasive 
ingredient, entering into the constitution of all 
their capacities, faculties, experiences, and ac- 
tivities. 

And the finer the point of organization ar- 
rived at, the more palpable and all-suffusing this 
womanly element becomes. It reaches its acme 
in Mary, the mother of Jesus. She never made 
much noise in the world, she was never tempes- 
tuous nor aggressive, but there was not a fiber in 
her, body, mind, or spirit, that is not felt by us 
to be woman ; and when God wanted a child to 
be brought up in a way to fit him to be the Sa- 
viour of the world, he gave him to her to love and 
take care of, and in that fact will be found all the 
meaning that the womanly heart has genius to 
find in it. 

The two sexes being thus discrepant by con- 
stitution, which is only another name for divine 
appointment, the whole effect of nurture and dis- 
cipline, so far as the nurture and discipline are 
legitimate, will be to make the differences between 
manhood and womanhood greater, not less. 
Development of beginnings that are dissimilar 
always issues in divergence, not convergence. 



Any civilization that transforms or tends to trans- 
form a woman into the female duplicate of a 
man is a false civilization. If women want to 
retain the supremacy which belongs to their sex 
they will have to keep it by making more and 
more of their womanliness, and not in trying to 
be mannish. If they succeed in convincing men, 
by the quality of their ambitions and interests, 
by the mode of their training and by the character 
of their pursuits, that the only difference between 
them and man is an affair of physical structure, 
there is an end to their queenliness and to mas- 
culine respect for it. I want to say this, without 
at all going into the details of the matter — the 
reader can think it out as far as she likes without 
the need of our phrasing it : if women desire to 
retain the supremacy which belongs to them as 
women, — belongs to them because inherent in 
their sex,— they will be obliged to cherish their 
femininity with some considerable measure of 
caution. I understand perfectly well the ground 
that I am upon. The security of a woman's 
hold, the security of a wife's hold upon her com- 
panion, is not that she is a female, but that she 
is a woman. Woman's proper destiny is on a 
distinct line from that of masculinity, and she 
will savor less and less of masculinity according 
as she approaches the perfection and consumma- 
tion of her being. 



8 



NOW, on the contrary, there is an element in 
the community, — a small one, I would fain 
hope, yet the size of a thing is no measure of the 
disquiet it will produce, even as one little piping 
frog in the meadow will outdo all the crickets 
that are chirping in the grass and all the whip- 
poorwills that are singing in the air, — there is an 
element in the feminine world that is suffering 
from what I shall venture to call " andromania." 
The word is not an English one, for the reason, 
I suppose, that the English language-makers 
never supposed that we should need such a term. 
It is constructed on the same principle as the 
word "Anglomania," which means a passionate 
aping of everything that is English. "Andro- 
mania" means, similarly, a passionate aping of 
everything that is mannish. It is an attempt on 
the part of those affected with the disease to 
minimize distinctions by which manhood and 
womanhood are differentiated, whether as regards 
their culture, their interests, or their activities. 
It is that animus which permits a woman to ima- 
gine that she has achieved a great triumph if 
she succeeds in doing something that only man 
has hitherto been accustomed to do, but that no 
woman has hitherto availed to do. It is that 
animus which excepts to having woman's public 
activities along any line distinguished by any 
designation of sex— as when, in a neighboring 



city not long ago, a company of women were 
organizing for action in a field where masculine 
efforts were already being exerted, and they 
objected to having their society called the 
"Women's Board of Aid," on the ground that 
their masculine analogues working in the same 
field did not call their organization the " Men's 
Board of Aid." Although these two societies 
were occupying the same ground, yet it was 
reasonable to expect that the two would cover 
the same ground in quite different ways ; and if 
the women in question had realized that fact as 
fully as they ought to have done, so far from 
wanting to exclude the term "women," they 
would have been anxious to retain it. 



I AM not criticizing any particular act of what 
I have ventured to call " andromaniacs " ; 
still less am I urging that these acts proceed from 
any desire or intention of being unwomanly. 
My criticism is only upon the disposition appa- 
rent in a good many quarters to narrow the dis- 
tinctive features of woman to the smallest possible 
area. That is not saying that it hurts a woman 
to do what a woman has never done before. It 
is not saying that if up to a certain time men only 
had been admitted to the bar, it is therefore an 
injury to a woman to be admitted to the bar; 



10 



nor that, because in most civilized countries the 
ranks of the army are filled by men and generaled 
by men, therefore women ought not to be pos- 
sessed of a military enthusiasm and ambition. 
We are not at this point arguing for the contrac- 
tion of woman's sphere of activity one whit more 
than we are arguing for its extension. Our only 
contention is that if she broadens out into new 
lines of employment or service at the impulse of 
a conviction that activities that are suitable for 
men are therefore suitable for women, and that 
the supreme distinction between the two is phys- 
iological, she is misconstruing her own nature and 
doing herself an irreparable injury. 



I REALIZE that I have not handled specifi- 
cally any one of the thousand touchy ques- 
tions with which the mind of womankind is in 
just this era bristling, but I am very confident in 
my conviction that, important as it is to have 
specific questions answered, it is a great deal 
more important to be appreciative of the under- 
lying principles to which such answers, if final, 
will have to conform. My only ambition in all 
this has been to lay the largest possible empha- 
sis upon womanhood as a mode of being that 
is radically differenced from manhood ; that 
womanhood in its interior and distinctive sane- 



titles is the first thing to be considered and 
appreciated as preparation for the just solution 
of any problems relative to feminine discipline, 
rights, or activities ; and that all questions such 
as those that are being discussed in these days 
require to be considered solely in the light of 
what woman is as God intends her and conceives 
of her. Such consideration seems to be ordi- 
narily ignored in a good deal of the rather flip- 
pant discussion of woman's education, occupation, 
and mission. It is said, if a man engages in 
certain industries, why should not a woman? If 
a man preaches, and practises medicine, why 
should not a woman? If a man votes, why 
should not a woman? We are not saying that 
she should not, but we do say that that way of 
stating the case betrays an easy-going in appre- 
ciation of the vastness of the interests and reali- 
ties involved, of which any intelligent Christian 
woman ought to be ashamed. There is no 
reasoning across from one to the other. Each 
of the two has its own distinctive personal dowry, 
and that dowry, and nothing else, is what will 
have to determine as to the uses to which the 
dowry can appropriately be put and the functions 
through which it can be fitly exercised. 



II 



THE UNIT OF SOCIETY 



THE best effort that ever can be put forth is 
that which concerns itself with the springs 
and sources of influence. The nearer we can 
come to the point where initial impulses form 
and shape themselves, the more we are doing 
toward determining everything in which those 
impulses will eventually issue. It is a compara- 
tively easy thing to deal with symptoms and to 
put superficial and artificial constraint upon forms 
of outward demeanor and action. All of that 
may be easy, but the chances are that it will be 
as profitless as it is easy. Whether as relates to 
men individually or associatedly, there is no work 
possible which can begin to compete for thorough- 
ness and effectiveness with the work that is ap- 
plied at the germinal sources of personal character, 
the germinal springs of social life and activity. 



12 



, 



13 



It is with all of this well in mind that I have 
undertaken to prepare this simple chapter on the 
matter of "the home." 

In considering this question, the most thorough 
thing which can be said by way of preliminary is 
that the home is the social unit. The individual 
is not a unit. We mean to say that he is not an 
integer. The individual considered by himself 
is no more than an attempt and an approxima- 
tion. Nature, history, providence, all assert as 
much. Yes, the Bible asserts the same thing 
when it says that "he setteth the solitary in 
families." Still earlier the same truth was de- 
clared in the words, " It is not good for man to 
be alone." The reason why it is not good for 
him to be alone is that the true unity is not in him- 
self, but in something which he merely helps to com- 
pose. The true unit of society is the home. The 
man needs the woman, the woman needs the man, 
and they both need the children. That is distinctly 
the intention of God, nature, and Scripture. 

The premise from which we start cannot, then, 
be mistaken or misleading. The distinct position 
thus taken will, if considered carefully, prove the 
easy solvent of a good many disputed questions. 
It encourages a great deal of current excellence ; 
it also rebukes a good deal of current foolishness. 



H 



THE unit of society, then, is the home. En- 
rolment that assumes to be thorough is not 
a registration by individuals, but by families. If 
we were to say that the structure of society is 
cellular, we should have to say that it is the 
family that constitutes each separate cell. No 
man, however entire, is a cell. No woman, 
however complete, is a cell. There is no finished 
cell except in the grouping of several individuals 
bound by the ties of domesticity. A bachelor is 
a dislocated fragment. His female counterpart 
is in the same category. It may not be their 
fault; it may He in the necessity of their case. 
Still, all in all, it is a condition reproved by nature 
and foreign to divine intention. 

It is to the family, therefore, that we shall have 
to look as being the prime point of concern in 
all that relates to the weal of our times and our 
kind. The strength and health of society are to 
be measured by the amount of affectionate em- 
phasis that is laid on the home idea ; and the 
wholesomeness of society is simply the sanctity 
of the home writ large. Homes are each of 
them the separate roots that carry their several 
contributions to the organized structure of the 
general life. 

All of this holds whether society be considered 
in its religious relations which we know as the 
church, or in its secular ones known as the state. 



*5 



The home is the first church and the home is 
the first state. There is nothing in either of the 
two that is not initially present in a small way 
inside the home circle. As regards the former, 
there is a very important idea conserved in so 
arranging our church auditoriums as to combine 
the congregation without sacrificing the identity 
of its families. The pew system of worship is 
the deft way that our church architecture takes 
to teach the doctrine that each home is a little 
religious organism, a miniature church all by itself. 
This is one of those interesting cases where a 
sense of fitness, even without our being distinctly 
conscious of it, nevertheless asserts itself and 
creates a very substantial expression of itself. 
And there is no preacher, at least there is no 
pastor, who does not carry distinctly in his head, 
and particularly in his heart, this cellular structure 
of his congregation, and who does not feel that 
the significance of his congregation depends, not 
on the number of its individuals, but on the num- 
ber of its families. 



THEN there is that old expression, "the 
family altar," which, although a phrase that 
savors a little of old Hebrew ritualism, still sug- 
gests in a most tender form the essential church- 
liness of the family circle. We can go still a 



i6 



little further and say that it is just the home re- 
lations that furnish the child the trellis-work upon 
which its young thoughts can clamber up into an 
appreciation of things heavenly and divine. The 
child's God is likely to be only the child's father 
imaginatively enlarged and projected. In his 
mother, coming so often as a go-between between 
himself and his father, he learns the meaning of 
mediation long before he requires to have his 
approaches to his heavenly Father mediated by 
a Christ Intercessor. And he never gets so far 
from the domestic sanctities of young association 
as to find a better, sweeter name than " home " 
for the heavenly country toward which his heart 
is inclining. 

The home is likewise a kind of apprentice- 
ground for acquiring the alphabet of secular 
aptitudes and duties. It is a place where the 
"children can rehearse reciprocal relations and 
obligations, and so acquire the art of being 
members of society and citizens. The family is 
a miniature republic furnished with all the small 
competitions and minute obligations that reap- 
pear on an enlarged scale in the broader field of 
the state and of adult society. In this way the 
family furnishes somewhat the same preparation 
for the responsibilities and enterprises of mature 
life that in old time the Mediterranean Sea fur- 
nished for the careers of exploration and colo- 



i7 



nization and general world-movement that de- 
veloped in the centuries later. The comparative 
contractedness and security of the Mediterra- 
nean afforded easy field for naval opportunity 
and commercial experiment; it afforded young 
commerce an incentive to try its ambitious but 
inexperienced wings, and so achieved for it 
the equipment that lay at the foundation of 
broader exploits and Atlantic adventure farther 
on. 



IN a complete and well-ordered family there is 
almost everything that there is in a state. 
There is the interaction between individual and 
individual. There is individuality in aims, all of 
such aims, however, requiring to be subordinated 
to the collective aim and advantage of the whole. 
There is sense of community and interest, even 
the child, if proper relations subsist, feeling that 
it is all a joint-stock affair, in which he is himself 
a small partner — as was so distinctly and appre- 
ciatively expressed by the little fellow who, when 
asked if he had any brothers and sisters, replied, 
" No, sir ; I am the only child we have." More 
to be emphasized in this connection than any 
other constituent element of family life is that of 
law, demanding the absolute subserviency of each 
little domestic citizen ; and there is nothing that, 
2 



as preparation for civic relations and duties, can 
begin to compete with a spirit of obedience. 
Submission to law is the keystone of civic stabil- 
ity. A boy can never be a good citizen until he 
has learned to obey, and in nine cases out of ten 
he will never learn unless he learns at home. 

In view of all the foregoing no one can feel a 
keen interest in his country or city or times with- 
out realizing that the great emphasis of thought 
and endeavor ought to put itself upon the home. 
Whatever is done there works governingly upon 
the whole field of the general life. If our homes 
were all right everything would be right, and until 
our homes are right nothing can be right. 



IT is but a step to go on from this and say that 
I believe the fundamental trouble with the 
times in which we live is the decadence of the 
home idea. And the first thing to be said under 
that caption is that marriage is not so generally 
thought of as formerly as being one of the certain 
and fixed events of a man's or a woman's life. 
As for the men, there are certain substitutes 
therefor, that need not be particularized here, 
and the evidences are not far to seek that such 
substitution is being in an increasingly large 
number of instances availed of. Women also, if 
we can judge from appearances, are less matri- 



I 9 



monially disposed than formerly. A good many 
avenues of employment are opening to them that 
formerly were either closed against them or, if 
not closed, considered a little unfeminine, into 
which they are now entering in considerable and 
increasing numbers ; and it has sometimes seemed 
as though the immunity from conjugal dominance 
or matrimonial mischance so secured was a con- 
sideration with them. It may be due to a feeling 
that woman is so much of an oarswoman that 
she can paddle her own canoe, and to a feeling 
that if she can do so she would rather like to 
demonstrate the fact to the other sex. There 
may be nothing in this, but things have some- 
times a little of that look. However that may 
be, marriage is not taken as a matter of course as 
much as formerly, either by young men or young 
women. 

To this must be added that even when marriage 
is consummated there is an impaired estimate of 
marital sanctity. One of the saddest lessons I 
have learned in the three years past has been the 
number of men and of women who are living 
in habitual disregard of their marriage vows ; all 
of which becomes well-nigh disheartening when 
it is remembered that the power of the home 
over the children never falls out of ratio with the 
holiness of the tie between the father and the 
mother. 



20 



It will be understood what I mean when I say 
that the home is tending to degenerate into a 
physical convenience — a place to eat in and to 
sleep in, but not the local axis of all that concerns 
its members in the higher relations and aspects 
of their life. 

*** 

WHEN I was a boy I always expected to be 
at home except when there was some 
special reason for my being away from home; 
unless appearances are deceptive, children now 
expect to be away from home except when there 
is some special reason for their being at home. 
And what holds of the children holds also quite 
largely, in a good many cases, of their parents. 
Domestic lines have ceased to be drawn with the 
old-time rigor and sharpness. The home is more 
construed to meet the physical convenience than 
to subserve a personal necessity. We are not 
intending by this that the family should steel itself 
against its neighbors or lock itself in from parti- 
cipation in the general life ; but, within certain 
limits, the more a family wants to be able to do 
for the general life, the more jealously and pas- 
sionately it will have to cherish its own separate 
and exclusive familyhood. 

It is a bad omen, therefore, that fathers and 
mothers are becoming contented to do without 



21 



a domicile appropriated to their own exclusive 
needs, and to live in hotels and boarding-houses, 
or to take one out of a tier of lofts technically- 
styled as an "apartment-house." It is not that 
that mode of living is not as cheap nor as com- 
fortable ; the point of it is that people are willing 
to live in hotel herds and apartment-house lofts 
because there is a diminished hold exerted upon 
them by the home idea. It is for that reason, 
also, that men spend so much of their time at 
the club. I consider the club to be one of the 
cleverest devices of the devil to prevent homes 
being made, and to sterilize and undermine them 
when they are made. I do not claim that there 
is not a wholesome role which the club may be 
expected to play ; I am only criticizing the club 
to the degree in which it replaces the devotion to 
the wife and the children. And I doubt if a man 
who is necessarily absent from his family the en- 
tire day can put in much time at the club even- 
ings without proving false to his privileges and 
recreant to his duties as a husband and father. 
This view of the case may have a strong odor of 
conservatism, but there are circumstances under 
which conservatism is the only logical or repu- 
table conclusion into which even a man that is 
ordinarily radical can reason himself. 



2* **# 



22 



THE drift of population toward the cities is, 
in this particular, one of the greatest diffi- 
culties that we have to encounter. A city house, 
except among the very wealthiest, has very little, 
and probably nothing, to distinguish it from any 
of the houses that are built on either side of it— 
and this not only in respect to the exterior, but 
to a large degree as relative to the interior. A 
few days ago I was calling at a house down in 
the old Seventh Waid. It was the same house 
that I am living in on Thirty-fifth street, only 
with a little more odor and not quite so much 
furniture. A house must have its distinctive 
features in order to make it a complete home. 
That is the charm of a home in the country which 
the city home rarely knows anything about. A 
home, to be perfect and entire, needs not only 
father and mother and children, but a dwelling- 
place that is fragrant with its own memories, 
hallowed by its own associations, and marked 
by its own characteristics and distinctions of style, 
manner, and environment, so that it shall stand 
utterly by itself in the child's regard, and become 
permanent ground from which he shall draw 
nutriment through all the years of his lengthening 
and expanding life. Men who have been born 
and bred in such a country home can hardly 
realize what they have gained by not having had 
their birth in the city ; and men who have been 



*3 



born and reared in the city are even more unable 
to appreciate what they have lost by not having 
been planted in the country. 

I have tried to cover as many features of the 
home question as space would allow, and to set 
forth in simple shape the vital relation that the 
home sustains to public character and life. It 
will be natural to go on from this and speak of 
woman as the "home-maker." 



Ill 

THE TRUE MISSION OF WOMAN 



THE preceding chapter accentuated the home 
as the fountain of all that is best in church 
and state. My object in this article is to accen- 
tuate the mother as the maker of the home. The 
father may be its support, but it is the mother 
that creates its atmosphere. The child's life is 
her own life prolonged. She gives it primary 
direction, and even after it begins to live a sepa- 
rate physical existence of its own it is the mother 
that still contributes to its bodily unfolding and 
that lays down the original lines upon which its 
intellectual and moral life shall be run. There 
is a class of women, unfortunately, that seem to 
think that all this matter of motherhood and 
domesticity is so worn and untinged with origi- 
nality that its truthfulness has somehow evapo- 
24 




25 



rated and its cogency become invalidated by its 
inability to make fresh pleas for itself. 

But, whatever certain adventurous women may 
think about it, it is sufficiently clear that nature 
has certain pretty decided opinions of its own on 
the matter, and that nature has so wrought its 
opinions into the tissue of woman's physical con- 
stitution and function that any feminine attempt 
to mutiny against wifehood, motherhood, and 
domestic "limitations" is a hopeless and rather 
imbecile attempt to escape the inevitable. All 
the female congresses in the world might com- 
bine in colossal mass-meeting, and vote with 
passionate show of hands that woman's sphere is 
coincident with the sphericity of the globe, or even 
of all the heavens ; but the very idiosyncrasy of 
her physical build, and the limitations essentially 
bound up in it, will sponge out her mass-meeting 
resolutions as fast as she can pass 'them. It is 
well enough for her to say that she wishes she 
were a man ; but she is not, and till she is she 
might as well succumb to the fact that God and 
nature had very different intentions for her from 
what he had for her brothers, and that he re- 
corded his intentions in a way that he has taken 
some pains to prevent her being able to forget. 
I am really sorry for those women that wish they 
were men ; I wish they were ; it would be such a 
relief to the rest of us, as well as to them ; but it 



26 



is a little late to move for a repeal, and without 
it any masculine experiments which they may 
venture will never either quite succeed or satisfy. 



THE greatest thing a woman can do is to do 
the thing that she was specifically endowed 
and ordained to do, and that is to bear children 
and train them for the uses and service of the 
world they are born into ; and only such women 
as are morally or intellectually incompetent to 
appreciate the full denotement of this, or who 
have greater ambition for aggressiveness or con- 
spicuity than they have for fulfilling their mission, 
will be inclined to resent this statement of the 
case as an indignity. I have yet to be convinced 
that any very considerable number of the sex are 
disposed to resist nature's intentions for them, 
but the actuating impulse of those who do is 
doubtless a passion for some sort of celebrity, 
and an impatience at the seclusion and the re- 
straints which femininity, so construed, imposes 
upon them. They are not content to be known 
only in their children, and that is one great reason 
why their children are so little known. If Joche- 
bed had had her head full of theories about an 
enlarged sphere for women, and had gone about 
Egypt stumping for female enfranchisement, the 
little hero of the bulrushes would probably have 



27 



shared the fate of the other male children of the 
period, and the lawgiver of Israel never have 
been heard of. So if Hannah, instead of devot- 
ing herself to the little incipient prophet, had been 
plotting to make a great world for Hannah, 
Samuel, it is natural to suppose, would never 
have heard the voice of the Lord, nor have initi- 
ated the prophetic period of Israel. What the 
world admires in the princess of women, the Vir- 
gin Mary, is simply that she made possible the in- 
fant of Bethlehem and the man of Galilee. Any 
woman who calls it intrusive limitation to be held to 
the paths of these three mothers in Israel lacks the 
true genius of her sex and is a feminine mistake. 
The substance of Christian living is to convert 
one's self into effects, and nature has indicated 
to woman that the particular effect into which 
she is to convert herself is her own nurtured boys 
and girls. It is a much greater thing to try to 
be a power than it is to try to achieve the repu- 
tation of being a power. 



WOMAN'S mission as thus defined gives 
opportunity for everything in the shape of 
personal discipline and genius that she is in con- 
dition to bring to it. There is no occasion for 
her seeking a " wider sphere " on any such ground 
as that the sphere of maternity does not afford 



28 



scope for all the equipment she has at her com- 
mand. What her sons and daughters will become 
need be limited only by her own personal being 
and development. It is her character and disci- 
pline of mind and heart that will set the key in 
which, almost certainly, the music of their lives 
will be played. It is noteworthy with what 
closeness the Scripture narrative binds back to 
maternal ground the life-issues of such men as 
Moses, Samuel, and Jesus. In each of these 
three instances the father counts for nothing, the 
mother for everything. Dr. Timothy D wight is 
quoted as having said : " My answer to the ques- 
tion, How I was educated, ends where it began : 
I had the right mother." 



THE mother is the continuous measure of her 
child's possibilities. So far as she realizes 
this she will understand that her educating agency 
in the premises is not a matter of supervising the 
affairs of the household. Personality is the only 
thing, after all, that counts much in education, 
and it is the baptismal energy of his own mother's 
personal pressure that will alone render to the 
child the requisite service. One of the things for 
which I shall be profoundly grateful clear into 
the next world is that I attended public school 
but two terms before I was twelve years old, and 



2 9 



I should not have been sent then had it not been 
that one of those terms the school was taught by 
my mother and the other by my father. My 
father was a farmer, and my mother, with four 
children on her hands and no hired help, attended 
to all the work naturally pertaining to a farmer's 
wife. Her days were long, — that was before 
eight-hour laws were agitated, — and one reason 
why they were so long was that she devoted 
herself to her children and to their initiation in 
the rudiments of character and education, de- 
clining to farm us out to the questionable moral 
supervision of nurses, or to the equally question- 
able mental discipline of tutors or the public 
schools. My mother had the exceedingly old- 
fashioned notion that children were born of 
mothers in order that they might have mothers 
to take care of them and bring them up. There 
is a good deal of the flavor of the Bible and of 
New England about that way of estimating the 
matter, but it does not appear that any more 
modern inventions afford much in the way of 
improvement. Substitutions for divine arrange- 
ments always fall a little short of being a success. 
There are some mothers that, even under the 
peculiar social conditions of our own decade, 
still take the same sort of care of their offspring 
that mothers used to do, and it is ordinarily not 
difficult to see that the validity of the method is 



3° 



attested by the quality of its issue. There are 
certain families, that it would be easy to designate 
by street and number, where the entire personality 
of the mother exhausts itself, and has for a great 
many years exhausted itself, in the production 
and maintenance of a home atmosphere and in 
building up the physical, intellectual, moral, and 
religious structure of her offspring. In such cases 
there may not be many monuments erected after 
the mother's death, nor any lengthy array of 
published obituary ; but a true mother lives for 
her children, and knows no other ambition but 
to live in her children. She aims at nothing more 
than unrecognized survival in their manhood or 
womanhood, and asks to be monumented only 
by the activities and fidelities of those to whom 
she has given life and who are her own life 
prolonged and perpetuated. 

It is with all this in view that I have ventured 
to say that the crying need is for better mothers. 
It is sometimes claimed that any ameliorating 
effort, in order to be thorough and radical, must 
expend itself upon the children. I should rather 
say that there is no so direct way of bettering 
church and state as to raise the tone of mother- 
hood. If society depends for its character upon 
the home, and the home depends for its quality 
and power upon the mother, then what so deep 
and fundamental work can be done as to seek to 



3i 

create sentiment in this direction and to encour- 
age among the older and younger members of 
her sex the conviction that a girl's discipline, 
physically, mentally, and morally, be conducted 
with close reference to her presumed destiny as 
wife and mother? 



I UNDERSTAND very well how old fogies 
of both sexes, and particularly new fogies of 
the female sex, will resent the matrimonial and 
maternal interpretation that I am here putting 
upon feminine destiny. However, I am confi- 
dent of my ground and proceed upon it. It 
needs, then, to be said in a general way that 
nothing should be omitted in the girl's training 
that will in due course of time qualify her to 
become material in the bodily, intellectual, and 
ethical structure of her offspring. She is the 
substance out of which, in anything like a natural 
and normal course of events, the lives derivative 
from her will, in every department of their being, 
be quarried. She must be actually everything 
that she wants her children to be potentially. 
She will therefore have to have an horizon wide 
enough to include the prospect both of the grow- 
ing girl and the growing boy. She will need to 
be competent to sow the seeds which shall even- 
tuate on the one hand in the matured powers of 



32 

manhood, and on the other in the ripened com- 
petencies of womanhood. 

It is in keeping with this to say that it is one 
of the pleasant features of our generation that 
increased attention is being given to the discipline 
of the female mind. In another article I may- 
criticize some of the methods by which that is 
accomplished, but, at any rate, it makes for pro- 
gress that woman is coming to regard herself less 
in the light of artistic bric-a-brac and more in 
the character of an intelligent staple. And the 
reason why I refer to this tendency as a progres- 
sive one is that it is so much done toward making 
woman a more commanding factor, and so quali- 
fying her to be more controlling and influential 
as a mother. There is nothing a woman can 
know, and no tension of mental fiber she can 
possess, which, if inwrought with the feminine 
impulse, will not enhance by so much the dis- 
ciplinary ministry she can render her children. 
There is no " strong-mindedness " and no com- 
pleteness of college training that will unsex her, 
provided only such possessions and acquisitions 
are dominated by the feminine instinct and mort- 
gaged to maternal ends and purposes. 



i 



T is rather pertinent to these times to say- 
rather as illustration than otherwise— that if 



33 



a mother is going to scatter in her boy's nature 
the seeds of civic virtue and achievement, she 
must be herself alive to the necessities of her time 
and familiar with the civic conditions under which 
she is living. Boys are taught a great many 
things, but they are rarely taught to be citizens. 
It is an excellent thing for them to be made ac- 
quainted with Roman and Greek history and 
the history of their own country, but wise citizen- 
ship means acquaintance with American condi- 
tions, and with American conditions of even date. 
It is a good thing to know yesterday and to-day 
both, but of the two it is more practical and neces- 
sary to know to-day. The boy, if he is going to 
be a safe and faithful citizen, needs to grow up 
with a deepening appreciation of his immediate 
environment, and with a widening comprehension 
of the relations into which he is soon to enter 
with others as members with them of one nation, 
State, and municipality. No man can ever be 
quite a safe and competent citizen who has not 
had planted and strengthened in him civic im- 
pulses before ever he moved out into the open 
arena of civic competition and effort; and the 
one who can best implant those impulses and 
knit them into the fiber of the boy's growing 
manhood is the boy's mother. I am not saying 
that it is not a good thing for a mother to go to 
the polls. I am only saying that it is a greater 

3 



34 



thing, and one requiring infinitely more tact and 
genius on her part, to secure in her boy that un- 
derstanding of the world he is a part of, and that 
knowledge of the civic relations in which he will 
stand when the time comes, that will guarantee 
his own fidelity at the polls and his own wise 
discharge of the obligations that citizenship will 
impose. Some of my loquacious sisters are giv- 
ing us to understand that men are very wicked 
and very much disposed to neglect their civic 
obligations. I do not want to be ungallant, but 
venture to remind them that each one of these 
wicked and unfaithful men was born of a woman, 
and that if his mother had been a better and 
more faithful mother the probability is that he 
would have been a better man and more faithful 
citizen. I do not want to be understood as de- 
siring to contract the sphere of woman's opera- 
tions ; my only feeling is that her originary sphere 
is the home, that domestic laxity and miscella- 
neousness lie at the root of a good deal of the 
world's current mischief, and that, however be- 
coming it may be for the sex to organize for the 
promotion of public interest and for the recon- 
struction of the world at large, there would be 
a singular felicity in their forming maternal 
associations looking to the more successful 
administration of their own affairs as wives and 
mothers, and to the more diligent cultivation of 



35 



their own specific diocese ; and when they have 
the intelligence and the heart to take care of 
their own boys and girls, it is presumable that 
the great outside world will be in a condition to 
take care of itself. 



IV 
COLLEGE TRAINING FOR WOMEN 

IN introducing this fourth article I must refer 
to the exceedingly pleasant and helpful cor- 
respondence which has been elicited by my 
previous articles. It is rather remarkable that 
everything that has thus far reached me in the 
way of bitter criticism has come from masculine 
censors, not from the sex to which my words 
have thus far been addressed. 

It is gratifying, also, to me to notice that in 
communications bearing upon these matters there 
has been regularly an earnest feminine approval 
of my main principle, which is that the two sexes 
are comprehensively distinct ; that manliness, on 
the one side, and womanliness, on the other side, 
have to do with everything which goes to com- 
pose the man or the woman, and that physical 
disparity is simply one, and that the most incon- 
36 



37 



siderable, aspect of a distinction that is pervasive 
and that extends clear to the core of personality. 
With this premise granted— and there seems to 
be a generous disposition to grant it— the subor- 
dinate details, out into which this main feature 
runs, can, it would seem, be met and disposed 
of with a great deal of facility. 



IT is one of the pleasant features of our gen- 
eration that increased attention is coming to 
be devoted to the education of the female mind. 
I say the " female mind " rather than the " mind 
of woman " for the purpose of holding my phrase- 
ology true to the principle just stated, that sex 
pervades the entire being. Femininity is a fea- 
ture of woman's intellectuality, and all questions 
relating thereto will require to be settled in recog- 
nition of that fact. No one can have -had to do 
for any great length of time with the mind of 
representatives of the two sexes, whether upon 
questions of morals or of science, without dis- 
covering the unlikeness of method in which those 
minds operate. I am speaking from my own 
experience as a school-teacher when I say that, 
however true it may be that mind works obedi- 
ently -to one constant system of law, regardless 
of difference of sex, yet to the degree that the 
male student, on the one hand, is distinctively 
3* 




38 



masculine, and the female student, on the other, 
distinctively feminine, the whole complexion of 
the mental process will be modified, and identity 
of results will be marked by a distinction of 
flavor. This can hardly be the case, I may say 
by way of concession, in those intellectual pro- 
cesses, mathematical, for instance, where the mind 
works purely as a machine, as much so as a 
Babbage calculator, and where, therefore, the 
personal element does not enter as a modifying 
or coloring feature. But aside from such excep- 
tions, which are too rare seriously to affect the 
question, sex asserts itself wherever mind works 
with a free personal play, and the female student 
is quite a distinct species of intellectual creature 
from its male counterpart. 

This leads up directly to the main position I 
desire to assert touching the school and college 
training of women, which is that if the student is 
female the training must be female, and the entire 
educational process be conducted with reference 
to the sexual quality of the minds to which it is 
directed. 



THERE has been quite a sudden development 
in this generation of what are known as 
female colleges. This movement is in part con- 
siderate and reasonable, and in part it is a fad. 



39 



A great many girls are going to Vassar, Smith, 
Wellesley, and Barnard because they want to be 
educated, and others are going because young 
men go to college and it is nice to do what young 
men do — what might be called "andromania" 
in the green. There is another contingent of 
young women who are motived in this by their 
desire to get on to an independent footing and 
to be in a situation to make their own way in 
the world, with something like an expectation 
that they will earn their living by their brains, 
and that husband and children will be to them 
always a terra incognita — using the college in that 
way as a means of helping them to escape the 
proper destiny of their sex. 

The institutions referred to are known as " fe- 
male " colleges, and there is something in that 
mode of distinction that involves an amount of 
wisdom that is not always suspected nor intended 
by those who use the designation. 



IF I call such a school a " female " college, there 
is the implication that the college itself is 
feminine, and that is the particular point I want 
to make : not simply that it is intended for female 
students, but that the college itself is feminine ; 
that it is inspired by a distinctively feminine 
genius ; that it is framed and worked with a con- 




40 



stant and consistent reference to the sex of its 
constituency and with a reference to the aims 
and ends which such constituency will naturally 
and properly shape for itself. 

One does not need to think very carefully in 
order to appreciate what a difference there is 
between this way of looking at the matter, and 
regarding a female college as being merely the 
ordinary sort of college, only limited to female 
students. The latter was the idea with which 
some, at least, of our female colleges started out, 
and one of the boasts that some of them used to 
make was that the discipline and curriculum were 
identical with those offered by men's colleges. In 
other words, it was advertised that the only 
feminine thing about them was the sex of the 
students in attendance. That is exactly the view 
of the case that would appeal with most con- 
geniality and satisfaction to a good many of our 
male-minded women ; but, fortunately, the her- 
maphroditic views of this class of people are not 
quite succeeding in controlling the current of 
opinion, and certain female colleges that began 
by publishing the fact that they were simply the 
female adaptation of male colleges are learning a 
better wisdom and are meditating how they can 
adapt the institution to their constituency, and 
not only have female students, but a "female" 
college for them to attend. 



4i 



It has been maintained that wifehood and 
motherhood are the one true and proper ambition 
of the sex. The " female " college, in the sense 
understood above, must, then, be framed and ad- 
ministered in a way to facilitate the fulfilment 
of this ambition. Undoubtedly there will be 
many students in attendance who will never be 
either wives or mothers ; but the purpose of the 
college must hit the general intention of the sex, 
and not the particular intention of individuals, 
and must have it for its effect to foster among its 
students the tendency to become home-makers. 



IT is not easy, neither is it important, to lay 
down specific rules in the premises ; it will be 
the general spirit of the institution, rather than 
any details of arrangement, that will determine 
its character and results in this particular. Let 
it once be settled that womanliness is the finest 
product which a female college can yield, with 
all that tendency wifeward and motherward which 
is the instinctive outcome of womanliness — I say, 
let this once be settled, and a large beginning 
will already have been made toward deciding the 
methods and machinery by which the college will 
do its work and compass its ends. 

With all this well in mind it is easy to wonder 
whether it quite comports with the situation that 



42 



so much of the discipline and instruction of fe- 
male colleges, as is commonly the case, should 
be in the hands of men. The question, at any 
rate, is worth asking. Such schools are so largely 
an innovation that it is reasonable to suppose that 
the best methods of administering them have not 
yet been hit upon. The male president of such 
college, and such male professors as are upon its 
staff of instruction, may all believe that woman's 
chief end on earth is to be a wife and mother and 
to cultivate the best possibilities of her offspring ; 
and these male functionaries may all teach this 
doctrine with emphatic reiteration ; but is it pre- 
sumable that masculine influence will produce 
feminine effects? The gentlemen members of 
the faculty may be so thoroughly persuaded of 
the truth of what I have here been urging that 
they will be able to convince their lady pupils of 
the same truth ; but it is one thing to persuade a 
class of young women that womanliness is the 
greatest accomplishment possible to them, and 
quite a distinct thing to secure and mature in them 
that womanliness. 

I never expect to see the teaching force of a 
male college made up in part of women. Why 
does it any more comport with the fitness of 
things that the teaching force of a female college 
should be made up, in whole or in part, of men? 
Is there any doubt but that, if women competent 



43 



for the position were attainable, they would meet 
the requirements of the case in a way that men 
cannot? 



IS it not pretty clear, without argument, that a 
thoroughly womanly woman can do more to- 
ward helping a college girl to become a woman 
than a thoroughly manly man can do? We may 
become so wonted to an infelicitous usage as not 
to realize its infelicity. There would be no per- 
tinence in these suggestions if it were the case 
that the object of a female college is to make 
scholarly women, female erudites. But once 
grant that its true aim is to produce the finest 
and most complete type of womanhood, and 
these suggestions become clearly apropos. In 
this I am not urging any theory, but simply 
opening up a line of inquiry germane to our 
primary postulate, that the best product which a 
female college can yield is womanliness, with all 
that instinctive leaning toward domesticity that 
womanliness involves. 

If this position is sound, it has a distinct bear- 
ing upon the question of co-education. If the 
prime object of male colleges is to produce, not 
scholars, but manhood, and the prime object of 
female colleges is to produce, not scholars, but 
womanhood, then it is rather natural to suppose 



44 



that one and the same mode of treatment will not 
issue in so great a diversity of result. Even in 
the vegetable and animal kingdoms it is dis- 
covered that the finer the type of organization 
the greater the care which is required in order to 
adapt treatment to organization. Any florist or 
horticulturist will tell us that, and so will the 
experienced keeper of a zoological garden. It 
is strange that we should feel it necessary to 
handle each variety of plant in our conservatory 
with so specialized a regard, and then imagine 
that a single style of discipline will conduct to 
distinctive maturity each of two orders of exis- 
tence so delicately organized and so widely dif- 
ferentiated as those of man and woman. We 
shall make a great deal more out of our lower 
and also out of our more advanced schools when 
we understand as well as the florist does what it 
is we are trying to do, and when we are as care- 
ful as he is to adjust expedients to purposes. 



I HAD, some time since, an exceedingly in- 
teresting conversation with a lady who has 
for a number of years been connected in an 
official capacity with one of the best known of 
our female colleges. It ought to be stated that 
the college referred to is one that is exceptionally 
exempt from influences that would tend to inter- 
fere with the broad purposes for which it was 




45 



founded — a college, therefore, which, it is pre- 
sumable, is in as fair a way as any to yield all the 
results proper to be expected of it. The inten- 
tions of the president and of all those associated 
in the administration of the college and in the 
instruction of the young ladies are of a most 
earnest kind, and it is the clear and unanimous 
intention of the members of the teaching staff to 
make the college a success in the best and richest 
sense of that term. How clearly defined in the 
minds of the teachers the proper scope of such 
an institution is, I am not able to state, but 
probably as much so as is the case in any similar 
institution in the country. The lady referred to 
holds such a position in the college as brings her 
in frequent and intimate contact with all the 
young ladies in attendance throughout the entire 
period of their course, so that she has exceptional 
opportunities for observing the collective effect 
produced upon the personal tone of the pupils 
by the discipline to which they are subjected. 
She is herself a graduate of the college, and came 
to her position, she tells me, thoroughly prepos- 
sessed in favor of female colleges in general. 
She has herself a thoughtful and disciplined 
mind, and was naturally, therefore, impressed 
with the general character of a school so refined 
in its moral tenor and so elevated in its educa- 
tional purposes. After several years of continu- 
ance in her position her verdict, however, is that 



4 6 



the effects produced by the institution are dis- 
tinctly out of line with what might be called the 
womanly trend. She does not attempt to describe 
with sharp definition all that she intends by such 
an expression, but goes no further than to say 
that there is some influence or other that is 
operating to weaken among the young ladies the 
distinctive feature of womanliness; that some 
inexpressible ingredient seems to enter into their 
personal composition that makes the term " fem- 
inine" just a little less signally applicable to 
them, and that the longer they remain in the 
college the more marked their divergence and 
decadence become. This phenomenon she is 
pronounced in attributing to no influence peculiar 
to that particular institution, but considers it in- 
herent in female colleges as such, as at present 
constituted and administered. 

The above is a line of inquiry that it will be 
interesting to prosecute in connection with other 
institutions than the one just considered, it being 
remembered, however, that, whatever corrobora- 
tion my informant's testimony may receive, there 
is not thereby made out a case against female 
colleges. The only thing that would be proved 
is that they are not yet so administered as to 
achieve their entire purpose, and that methods 
and appliances are not selected with due reference 
to the material upon which they are employed. 



WOMEN WITHOUT THE BALLOT 



A DESIRE for the ballot, which distinguishes 
what is probably quite a small minority of 
our feminine population, is motived by one or 
other of three considerations. The ballot is 
claimed by some because of the mistaken notion 
that suffrage is a right inherent in personality. 
Other women are suffragists not* because they 
care anything for the ballot in itself considered, 
but because possessed of those masculine prepos- 
sessions that make them restless at seeing men 
do anything that they are not themselves allowed 
to do. Many of this class probably are not so 
anxious to vote as they are anxious to know that 
they can vote if they want to. It would be 
interesting to know how many of such women 
would be converted from their views if it should 
seriously be proposed to pass a bill requiring 
47 




4« 



women to vote. Human nature is a peculiar 
thing, and it certainly will not be un gallant to 
say that all the peculiarity is not monopolized by 
the male sex. Probably the particular stripe of 
suffragists I am commenting on just now would 
find the virulence of their distemper measurably 
relieved by having the coveted privilege accorded 
to them for a time. It would work something 
as in the case of a jealous child who is cured of 
its jealousy by being allowed to hold in its own 
hand a little while the exclusive plaything of the 
mate it is jealous of. There are, however, in the 
third place, a considerable number of women that 
are considering with a great deal of honesty and 
womanly seriousness the question whether the 
ballot, if put into woman's hands, would not be 
a means of correcting certain evil conditions in 
society that could be less easily reached in any 
other way. 



IT is very easy to have a pronounced opinion 
upon the effect which such an extension of 
the ballot would produce, although the data do 
not seem as yet to be sufficiently at command to 
give to such pronounced opinions any particular 
value. Our uneasy sisters would be making a 
substantial contribution to the cause they have 
so closely at heart if they, for instance, would 



49 



canvass two of the wards in this city, say the 
Tenth and the Twenty-second, and by the means 
put themselves in condition to inform the public 
distinctly and authoritatively just what effect 
would be produced at our next election by hav- 
ing the privilege of suffrage accorded to the 
women of those two districts. In order to do 
this our lady canvassers would have to discover 
how many of the women there resident would go 
to the polls if allowed to, and what kind of a 
ballot those who went would cast. There are 
suffragists in plenty whose intuitions inform them 
that such an extension of the prerogative could 
augur only well for the general interests ; and no 
one would be more prompt than I to recognize 
and honor feminine intuition ; but in matters so 
complicated as these intuition counts for a good 
deal more by being moderately mixed with sta- 
tistics. If such an extension of the franchise 
will conduce to the common advantage, my ad- 
vocacy of it is assured; only, when the step is 
taken it cannot be recovered, and foresight is not 
nearly as expensive as hindsight. The proposi- 
tion is, therefore, a serious one, that such moving 
spirits as are concerned to see woman suffrage 
become an accomplished fact as a means to the 
rectification of existing evils should study up the 
ground in the manner proposed, that they should 
select certain areas of population that will vari- 

4 




5° 



ously represent different social orders and con- 
ditions, and discover, with the smallest possible 
margin of uncertainty, just in which way the 
changes proposed would turn the scale. The 
process would be found to be an onerous one 
and eminently disagreeable, but it would be only 
of a piece with a good deal else that is offensive 
in political concerns, and it will be well to have 
our intending stateswomen early inured to it. 
Masculine suffrage means a great deal besides 
stepping up to the polls and putting in the box a 
nice clean ballot ; and so will woman suffrage, if 
it ever comes. 

* # 

I HAVE not in the foregoing impugned in any 
way the intelligence or the sincerity of such 
women as are thinking of the ballot as a means 
of improving our social and civic condition. I 
am simply waiting for more light, and waiting 
for them to give more light, only understanding 
by light something in the shape of ascertained 
facts and demonstrable figures accurate enough 
to found a safe opinion upon. In the mean time, 
while these facts are being collected and these 
figures ascertained, I would like to suggest to my 
lady readers a means by which the object which 
they have in view can with certainty be effected, 
and a very substantial start be made in the direc- 



5i 



tion of benefiting the general situation, especially 
among those who belong to the unfavored and 
discouraged classes. That which follows is not 
at all in the nature of theory, and its practicability 
is certified to by the experience of thirty or forty 
earnest women who have banded themselves- 
together in an organized sisterhood, and who 
have been laboring together for several years in 
the effort to raise the tone and stimulate the life 
of an equal number of families in one of the 
easterly districts of New York city. The whole 
work is under the general supervision of a woman 
who knows the district, and who is also personally 
acquainted with each lady member of the organi- 
zation. Her study is to effect as perfect an ad- 
justment between the two as possible, and upon 
learning the needs, infirmities, and general status 
of any new family, to bring into relation with it, 
and to establish in the midst of it, such member 
of the organization as seems best fitted to that 
family's personnel and condition. It differs from 
ordinary missionary efforts in several essential 
particulars. In the first place, its dealings are 
not with the individual, but with the family. It 
aims to elevate and invigorate the home. It deals 
with the household in its unity, and with its in- 
dividual members only through their participation 
in that unity. In that way any relaxed bonds of 
domestic life are strengthened, and the whole 



5 2 



associate life of father, mother, and children wins 
fresh stimulus. It proceeds on the safe and sure 
principle that the one supreme fact in the home 
is its communal life, and that the one true method 
of enriching and enlarging the fractions is to 
aggrandize the integer which those fractions 
combine to compose. The lady, therefore, makes 
it her first study to establish herself in the family 
confidence, and to win her way to such position 
within it as shall enable her to put an easy and 
unobtrusive touch upon any element in the house- 
hold life that may seem to her to require develop- 
ment, amendment, or reinforcement. 



ANOTHER feature in the policy of this 
il organization is that it abstains as scrupu- 
lously as possible from the use of money. Its 
members have constantly to be cautioned against 
the temptation to build personal results out of 
impersonal material. The families that these 
ladies minister to are some of them poor, and yet 
poverty is not really the malady that lies at the 
basis of their wretchedness or their debility. 
They are not wretched because they are poor; 
they are poor because they are wretched; and 
trying to relieve them by giving them money is 
only repeating the error so frequently committed 
by medical practitioners of treating the symptoms 



53 



instead of the disease. Outward poverty is the 
advertisement which a man publishes of his own 
inward penury. Giving money to such people is 
not a whit less inadequate and cheap than hang- 
ing borrowed leaves on a tree that is sapless. 
Sap will make leaves, but leaves will not make 
sap. That is the policy, then, upon which our 
organization is worked. It proceeds distinctly 
upon the principle that if a family is to be 
strengthened and quickened in its associate life 
it must be by that replenishment of its vital sup- 
plies which is possible only by the introduction 
of new personal life from outside. That is the 
real genius of all amelioration everywhere. Blood 
is sometimes taken from a healthy subject and 
introduced into veins that are impoverished. 
The surgeons call it transfusion. The theologians 
spell it redemption. I am not preaching, but only 
stating the principle according to which everything 
in the shape of ameliorated condition always pro- 
ceeds. It is more expensive than giving money 
or than distributing tracts, but it yields more also. 
Indeed, it is the only policy that can be counted 
upon for essential and permanent effects. 



AT one time, a little while prior to the muni- 
-l\. cipal election of 1894, it looked as though 
a goodly number of the earnest women in this 
4* 



54 



city were going to adopt that policy of action in 
the move to redeem the city, and as though they 
were going to work to create little oases in the 
desert of down-town life by opening up there the 
springs of their own richer and fuller personality, 
and becoming heart and ambition and intelligence 
and hope to the ignorant and oppressed house- 
holds that were just beginning to dream of the 
dawn of a brighter, sweeter day. There were 
two or three weeks in the month of October when 
the heart of poor, struggling womanhood in the 
lower and easterly portion of the town was 
strongly moved upon by the overtures of certain 
women of the more favored class, who drew into 
sisterly relation with them, and suggested to them 
that they and their homes might be enfranchised 
into a larger liberty, and that they were going to 
come in among them and teach them a better 
wisdom, and shield them from the wrongs and 
the tyranny practised upon them by political and 
industrial tyrants. It almost looked as though 
we were upon the verge of a new era. Those 
women did more to touch the heart and to open 
up new fountains of expectation than ten times 
the number of men could have done. Transfu- 
sion told instantly in the quickened pulse of the 
blood that had been so long sluggish and impov- 
erished. The door of opportunity stood wide 
open, and it stands there still, but to all appear- 



55 



ances the ladies up-town and the desolate homes 
down-town are as far apart as they were three years 
ago. The last I heard of the Ladies' Municipal 
Movement, that could so easily have captured 
the womanhood of southern New York, was that 
one of its representatives was making periodic 
visits through one of the up-town portions of the 
city studying up the matter of cleanliness in the 
interest of the Street Cleaning Department! I 
do not want to do anybody injustice, and it is 
very likely that there has been a great deal done 
that I have not happened to hear of. 



THE thoughts that I am presenting in this 
article are of a kind that ought to make 
earnest women thoughtful. Perhaps the ballot 
will be put in their hands by and by, but even if 
it is, social conditions, good or bad, are not a 
thing that can be voted in and out. It is very 
easy to forget, when writing or discoursing in 
learned phraseology about the corrupt conditions 
with which society is beset, that society and its 
conditions are just simply what the individual 
character of the separate families in society con- 
stitutes it to be. There is no way, therefore, of 
working at the root of the matter and effecting 
any essential change except by dealing with and 
changing the character of the ultimate elements 



56 



of society, unit by unit. This is a long and tired 
road, but there is no shorter and no easier one. 
Sociological discussions may have a certain part 
which they can render, but proper people can 
discuss, and at the same time improper people 
can be going to the devil faster and faster. Civic 
clubs can prosper up-town at the same time that 
character, domestic and civic, is becoming in- 
creasingly degenerate down-town. Men and 
women both, who are disposed to take the situa- 
tion seriously, may as well face the situation and 
realize that there is no fancy device for saving a 
city or a ward. If women who think they could 
help to right things by the exercise of suffrage — 
and perhaps they could— will deal with the situa- 
tion candidly, they will understand that, however 
many new and better laws their ballots might be 
the means of helping us to enact, the laws we 
have already are more and better than are en- 
forced, and that the fault is not primarily with 
the laws, but with people, that society is so badly 
administered, and that no ballot, even though 
cast by the white hand of an honorable woman, 
will make people better. 



THE distinctive thing about such a movement 
is that it brings personality in its intelligence, 



57 



sweetness, and plenitude into touch with per- 
sonality in its debility, degradation, and igno- 
rance, and reconstructs and regenerates it. There 
is no particular difficulty in the case, except the 
indisposition of the more favored class to make 
any movement toward social amelioration that is 
going to involve personal cost on their own part. 
Certain women are talking a good deal about 
their rights. It seems to me that one of their 
most precious and conspicuous rights is to go in 
among the downtrodden women of our cities and 
towns, who have even fewer rights than they, and 
by the touch of their own womanly vigor create 
within them the inspiration of a clearer vision and 
a larger hope. There will be no need of legisla- 
tion or of amended constitution in order to the 
extension to them of this opportunity. There are 
tens of thousands of women in the city of New 
York who are as ignorant of the true genius of 
American institutions and of the spirit of Ameri- 
can civilization as though they were living in 
another century and under the pressure of a 
Russian or Turkish despotism. And these women 
are sensitive to the touch of ameliorating influ- 
ence. I am not antagonizing female suffrage, 
but the fact remains that women have a great 
many more rights than they are using, and are 
standing at the threshold of innumerable doors 



5« 



of opportunity into which they have not yet 
entered. The improvement of social conditions 
is a very serious and discouraging business. It 
is to be effected only by the medium of personal 
agency, and for that kind of ministry one woman 
is the equivalent of ten men. 



VI 

MARRIAGE AND ITS SAFE- 
GUARDS 



MARRIAGE is a divine institution, and its 
sanctity is assured only as its divineness 
is appreciated and acknowledged. God himself 
married the first bridal pair, and has been a factor 
in every perfect nuptial union consummated since. 
In view of the significance which, in my previous 
articles, I have conceded to the H family, it will 
follow necessarily that the supreme import of the 
conjugal relation, in which the foundations of the 
family are laid, should be recognized. The most 
important thing in regard to this entire matter 
that can be said is that the family structure will 
denote only so much in point of beauty, dignity, 
and power as is denoted by the marriage tie in 
which it is grounded. Whatever disturbs or 
menaces the foundations disturbs or menaces all 
that those foundations are set to sustain. 
59 



6o 



A CHILD, therefore, as it approaches ma- 
turing years, needs some initiation into the 
meaning of the relation subsisting between his 
own father and mother. The difficult}- involved 
is no sufficient reason for evading the difficulty. 
The fact that there is an element of the instinctive 
involved still leaves ample room for the play of 
intelligence and parental guidance. Children 
have very often in later years to pay for the 
equivocal and prudish unfrankness of then- 
parents. Undoubtedly the mutual bearing of 
father and mother in the presence of their children 
will be itself the best exposition of what the 
marriage relation betokens, and will operate with 
vastly more effect than any other influence to 
give to the children either an elevated or a pau- 
perized sense of its interior meaning ; but there 
remains still a field for the occupancy of precept, 
provided such precept has the support of whole- 
some and corroborating example. The object 
of these intimations is rather to set the reader 
thinking than to do his thinking for him. The 
existence of a perfect marriage relation between 
a husband and wife wall itself do almost every- 
thing toward inducing sound matrimonial opinion 
among the children, but something additional 
may be done toward securing for them sound 
matrimonial practice. The whole matter is an 
involved and delicate one. There are influences 



6i 



operating in the case that are of a very high order, 
and other influences that are a great deal less fine. 
Marriage is a unique combination of motives 
drawn from very different quarters. It is some- 
times proper matter of wonderment that married 
life is not, even more frequently than it is, a dis- 
appointing and disastrous failure. 

The presence in the case of ingredients that 
are distinctly unspiritual and physical makes all 
the more necessary the emphasis to be given to 
the sanctity of marriage as a whole. It is on this 
account that marriage needs so scrupulously to 
be safeguarded. Scripture is exceedingly frank 
in its dealings with the subject, but always suc- 
ceeds in leaving the impression of the unspeakable 
sanctity of the tie by which those properly in the 
marriage relation are combined. The Bible is a 
wonderful authority to consult upon this matter 
as upon so many others. It can treat even the 
most commonplace aspects of the problem with- 
out either compromising its own dignity or tar- 
nishing the luster of the relation which it handles. 



THE little girl's affectionate care of her doll 
is a prescience of maternity; it is uncon- 
scious prophecy. Children should be taught to 
expect that they will be married sometime, and 
not only that they will be married, but that they 



62 



will have children of their own. Paul, in his letter 
to Titus, among other matter which he gave him 
to preach upon, charged him to see to it that 
young women were instructed both to love their 
husbands and to stay at home and take care of 
their children. The apostle presupposed mother- 
hood as well as wifehood, and knew that it was 
only the evasive handling of the matter that 
would issue in possible mischief. Dealing with 
an honorable relation as though it were a semi- 
criminal one is just what will make it in effect to 
be a semi- criminal one. There is a great deal 
that this is not the place to say, but that mothers 
should not be slow to say to their daughters or 
fathers slow to say to their sons. Motherhood, 
so far from being a questionable corollary of 
marriage, is one most important element of its 
sanctity. There has never been a time in the 
history of our country when that doctrine has 
been a more important one to be taught than it 
is to-day. It is becoming the habit of society to 
discourage motherhood. My impression is, al- 
though I am not yet in possession of the figures 
to justify it, that it would be discovered that low 
estimate of marriage and aversion for maternity 
keep in very clear and even pace with each other. 
People who are at all familiar with the present 
tendencies of thought and action are aware that 
something besides the high-pitched tone of our 



63 



civilization is needed to account for the di- 
minished number of children now as compared 
with what it was fifty years ago. 

*** 

EASY laws of divorce are another menace to 
the sanctity of marriage and the sweet dig- 
nity of home life. The indestructibility of the 
marriage tie is the only means by which there 
can be assured in us a sense of its holiness. 
Marriage I believe to be the most sensitive point 
in the entire matter of our civilization, and the 
prospects of our civilization can, therefore, be 
pretty accurately measured by the amount of 
sacred and enduring meaning that the general 
mind attaches to the marriage tie. Increased 
facility of divorce, and the increasing respect in 
which we are coming to hold divorced people, 
are, therefore, evil omens of social and national 
destiny. Christ's law is in this particular, as in 
so many others, extreme, but I am perfectly will- 
ing to be called an extremist in matters that touch 
our present so intimately and that bear so im- 
mediately upon our future. Society is not safe 
under a compromising or temporizing policy. I 
remember how as a boy I felt in regard to a 
certain woman that I was told had been divorced. 
She was, in my esteem, a kind of outcast and 
moral outlaw. It is difficult for me to-day to 



64 



have exactly that old-time feeling reproduced. 
Public sentiment has in the mean time retro- 
graded, and I have retrograded with it. "Till 
death us do part" is in the marriage service 
without being in the marriage relation. We 
clergymen are in some measure responsible for 
this. We are often making marriage cheap by 
marrying over again people that had gotten tired 
of their previous marriage. I have done that 
thing myself, although only subsequently made 
aware of the real facts in the case. A preacher 
would have to deliver a good many sermons 
from his pulpit on the sanctity of the home to 
rub out the mischief he would do to the home 
by standing at the altar and making one two 
people that had no business to be anything but 
two. "For better or for worse" can be in the 
marriage service without being in the marriage 
relation. There is no farce which is so full of 
the promise of issuing in tragedy as to pass the 
nuptial ring to a couple who have no sense of 
marriage as a holy and indestructible covenant. 
There is not a great deal of difference, really, 
between having two wives at the same time, and 
having them at different times and changing off 
at the suggestion of whim or convenience. The 
essence of polygamy is in it in either case ; only 
in the first instance it is contemporary, and in 
the other consecutive— in one case side by side, 



65 



and in the other "tandem." In one, as in the 
other, it is essentially adulterous, is so designated 
by Christ, and requires to be so considered by 
those who have professedly submitted themselves 
to his law. 

The only way to kill divorce among people who 
have any ambition to be accounted reputable is 
to treat as being a little "off color" remarried 
people who have been divorced on unauthorized 
grounds. How we carry ourselves after we are 
married will depend very much upon the con- 
ception we have of marriage before entering into 
that state, and that conception is one that we 
need to be equipped with by parental example 
and initiation, and by the strongest example and 
most care-taking initiation. 



IT is closely in keeping with the 'whole train of 
argument to say a word in regard to early 
marriages. That is the natural order of event. 
Divine intention seems quite distinct upon the 
matter. Such marriages, when properly con- 
summated, are a means of personal establishment 
and security to the parties implicated. For a 
young man or a young woman to be wholesomely 
married is the next step to being regenerated. 
To be out of that condition is counter to nature, 
and to disregard nature subjects to all kinds of 



66 



exposure. It is sometimes forgotten that nature's 
arrangements and intentions are in the nature of 
a divine ordinance, which may be of the same 
authoritativeness as though drafted literally and 
included in the decalogue. 



THE writer has learned that it is one of the 
unfortunate features of our modern life in 
large towns that so few opportunities are afforded 
to young men and women of the middle classes 
of being thrown together in a healthy and un- 
affected way. It is in that kind of atmosphere 
that relations more naturally form themselves 
which may be expected to develop into marriage. 
A great many young men, at any rate, would 
instantly appreciate the significance of what is 
here intended. They come into the city from 
outside, where they are known and respected, 
but on entering the city they are nobody. The 
unknown young man in the city is always dis- 
trusted. Perhaps that is right, but whether right 
or wrong, it is fact. It is not easy for him to 
come into social relations with such members of 
the opposite sex as stand upon a higher or even 
upon the same social platform with himself. It 
is exceedingly natural, therefore, for him to drop 
down to a lower social platform. This makes clear 
a great deal that would be otherwise inexplicable. 



6 7 



It is unfortunate that so many young men feel 
themselves compelled to postpone marriage till 
they have acquired a competence and can main- 
tain themselves and their family in a condition 
of ease and semi-luxury. Sometimes this is the 
fault of the man, sometimes of the girl, and 
sometimes of the girl's parents. With whichever 
of the three the blame rests, it works hardship 
and injustice. If there is ever a time in a man's 
life when he needs the encouragement and co- 
operation of a wife, it is in the earlier years of 
his manhood, when success is still unreached, and 
when every possible resource needs to be availed 
of in order to make success attainable. It is not 
quite the fair thing for the girl to refuse to be- 
come his bird till he has fabricated a golden 
cage for her to sing in; it is a great way from 
realizing the scriptural idea of " helpmeet." All 
of this is in the line of treating the wife as a mer- 
chantable delicacy instead of recognizing her as 
a consort. The very parents, too, who are least 
disposed to surrender their daughter until there 
is a visible equivalent in sight are sometimes the 
ones who never would have attained their own 
affluent estate had a like policy been observed 
toward them, and had they not stood together 
while still at the foot of the ladder and helped 
one another up its ambitious but tiresome rounds. 



68 



THE meaning and sanctity of marriage 
are badly enfeebled and tainted by being 
brought into the market and made a matter of 
trade and dicker. Love is liable to be foolish 
and more passionate than intelligent ; at the same 
time, nothing can take the place of love as the 
axis upon which the whole matrimonial matter 
ought to swing. A marriage in which discrep- 
ancies are evened up by considerations that are 
foreign to the main point is alien to the genius 
of the holy institution, and degrades into com- 
mercial barter that which is designed to be a 
contract of souls. The girl is very likely poor 
and handsome, the man wealthy and we do not 
know what else. Marriage under such circum- 
stances is quite likely to be a blunt matter of 
trade. He says to her in effect, "You give to 
me your beauty, and I will give you a share of 
my money." We have most of us read " Dom- 
bey and Son." She consents to be labeled 
"personal property," and he balances the ac- 
count with hard cash, architectural luxuries, and 
bric-a-brac. It is shrewd in him, but it is not 
quite what we would have liked for the girl— that 
is, if she is a respectable girl. There is another 
style of matrimonial dicker that is coming in 
vogue among our ambitious young American 
women of the moneyed classes. There are a 
good many rich girls in America who have never 
kept their genealogical record, or, if they have, 



6 9 



take no particular interest in consulting it, and 
find more amusement in contemplating their own 
or their father's assets. Then, per contra, on the 
other side of the sea there are a good many 
languid male scions of nobility, whose original 
royal blood has been diluted down to almost the 
vanishing point of attenuation, but who find in 
that feeble dilute more satisfaction than they do 
in their still more attenuated bank-account. Limp 
nobility, anxious for his exchequer, meets opulent 
commonalty, concerned for her pedigree, and 
propose, not to marry one another, but to wed 
their respective commodities, — his blood and her 
dollars,— and go before the priest, and decorate 
the occasion with orange-blossoms and stringed 
instruments, in order to throw over the whole 
the glamour of regularity. 

As a concluding word to parents, let it be said 
that just the delicacy of the whole fnatter is what 
makes it especially important to handle it with 
dignified frankness. The children too often 
derive from their parents the impression that 
marriage and its related interests lie about half- 
way between a sin and a joke. There is nothing 
from which sin is further removed and nothing 
to which the comic is more unutterably alien ; 
arid that home which best succeeds in making 
the marriage relation dear to the finest instincts 
of the children most blesses their present and lays 
the securest foundation for their future. 

5* 



VII 
THE TRAINING OF A CHILD 



HOWEVER people may differ as to details 
of education, all will agree that the prior 
question to be settled concerns the real purpose 
which education is intended to subserve. We 
must know what education intends before we can 
settle upon the method by which it is to be 
prosecuted. Diversity of educational theories 
springs, in the first instance, from differing con- 
ceptions of the meaning of life. We need a 
well-defined object before there can be either 
intelligence or stability in our method of com- 
passing it. 

In the main there are two general ends which 
a parent may pursue in planning for the educa- 
tion of his child : he may start with the idea of 
the child's possibilities, and make all the appli- 
ances of discipline bear upon the question of 
70 



7i 

developing those possibilities to their utmost, 
and seek to produce the child into the closest 
possible approximation to personal completeness ; 
or the parent's initial motive may be so to study 
the child's relations to immediate surroundings as 
to establish the most perfect agreement between 
him and them, to the end of making his career a 
comfortable one, and, in the ordinary acceptation 
of the term, a successful one ; for, when it is said 
of a man that he has been successful, it is sup- 
posed to mean that he has gained the mastery 
over circumstances and obliged them to pay him 
pecuniary tribute. One policy amplifies the boy ; 
the other trains him into an expert. One makes 
him big ; the other makes him sharp. One makes 
him rotund; the other grinds him down to an 
edge. Without stopping to remark that every 
judicious policy of education will consult the 
conditions under which human life is to be lived, 
and will strive to adapt it to those conditions, 
yet, even then, the difference in animus between 
the two policies just stated is clearly apparent, 
and accounts for the contrariety of methods em- 
ployed and for the contrariety of results produced. 

IT is not the intention of this article to be homi- 
letic, but there is one important religious con- 
sideration related to the matter of education, the 



72 



admission or exclusion of which will go far toward 
deciding which of the two schemes of discipline 
will be pursued. The more the child is felt by 
his parents to signify, and the greater the meaning 
which, in their esteem, inheres in him by virtue 
of what he is intrinsically, the more widely they 
will plan for him and the less will they consult 
the accidents of circumstance in deciding upon 
the method of his training. Especially will this 
be the case if they conceive of him as endowed 
with possibilities that transcend circumstance, 
that are superior to the small remunerative tricks 
which he may be taught to play with circum- 
stance, and if they think of him as gifted with a 
destiny that is not only future, but eternal. There 
is nothing more unphilosophical than a theory of 
education that undertakes to shape itself regard- 
less of the question of the mortality or the im- 
mortality of the mind and heart proposed to be 
educated. Such inconsiderateness is of the same 
quality as that which would be practised by an 
architect who should decide upon the amount 
and quality of foundation he would put in, and 
the ground-plan of his building, before knowing 
to what height the building is to be carried. A 
two-story dwelling-house needs to be started in 
one way and carried forward upon one set of 
structural lines ; a twelve-story apartment-house 
requires treatment that is distinctly different. If 



73 



the parent feels the immortality of the boy he is 
trying to train, that element of immortality will 
determine the complexion and the fiber of the 
disciplinary policy he will adopt toward him. 
There are many parents who confess to the doc- 
trine with their lips, but who give little token of 
it in the way they set about to frame the character 
and compass the equipment of their children. If 
it is true that a presentiment of coming adult life 
puts us upon qualifying ourselves for it, just so 
true is it that a presentiment of immortal life — 
according to the degree of clearness in that pre- 
sentiment — will lengthen the lines and broaden 
the scheme of preparation with which we go 
about to equip ourselves for that life. A parent 
will feel all of this and work it into his educa- 
tional scheme. The size and distance of our 
purpose does assert itself in the steps we take to 
accomplish it, and leads us to take those steps 
with considerate seriousness. Even in the erec- 
tion of a material edifice there is a certain dignity 
and solemnity attaching to the lower courses of 
its masonry, and the laying of its corner-stone is 
not infrequently accompanied by services of a 
serious, or even of a religious, character. There 
seems to be a feeling of the way in which that 
stone is to be structurally knit into the entire 
fabric, and a presentiment of the superstructure 
which is going to build itself up through the air 



74 



and perhaps through the generations, each suc- 
ceeding layer of stone following in the line of the 
structural prescript determined for it in the blocks 
laid at the bottom. It is rather singular that 
parents seem often to have so little of an analo- 
gous feeling in putting in the first stones in the 
educational structure of their children. 



WHEN this is considered it seems strange 
that fathers and mothers should delegate 
so much of the earliest, and therefore the most 
determinative, part of the education of their chil- 
dren to hirelings. It seems as though, if they 
knew or even suspected all that is involved, it 
would be a pain to them to have any move made 
that they themselves had not a hand and a part 
in. It is a serious truth that the initial reaches 
all the way through to the final. A very slight 
angular deviation at the start means vast width 
of departure at the end if the line pursued is a 
long one, and particularly if the line is so long 
that it never comes to an end. This makes child- 
training a serious matter. The nursery means in 
this particular a great deal more than the college. 
The college carries forward what the nursery has 
begun, but it is only the nursery that is initiative. 
Child-training is, in the first instance, ethical 
rather than intellectual. No one will ask to have 



75 

this point argued who considers that the child is 
to be educated for the purpose of his own per- 
sonal enhancement and not for the purpose of 
making him an expert or a sharper. It is a great 
deal easier to make people bright than it is to 
make them sound. Mentality is an easy art as 
compared with morality. There is a good deal 
to be said about intellectual discipline when we 
get to that point, but it is still true that the issues 
of life are out of the heart and not out of the 
brain. The brain can be taught from books, but 
morality is not a thing that can be printed. There 
are, it is true, books that are published on ethics, 
but few read them and probably nobody practises 
them. The old Hebrews were deluged with 
moral precepts, some of them written by God's 
own hand ; but even the first generation that had 
the ten commandments had to be killed off before 
the Promised Land could be entered and history 
go on. 



I AM not going to underrate the value and 
importance of mental schooling for the chil- 
dren ; but it needs to be said that unless a man 
has a pure and honest heart, the less he knows 
the better it will be for him and for all concerned. 
And it needs also to be said that even trust- 
worthiness of intellectual action waits on personal 




7 6 



soundness. Sound brain and an unsound life are 
incompatible. Even if our object were only to 
secure the finest and fullest intellectual develop- 
ment, we should still aim first of all to secure a 
foundation of personal integrity for the scions of 
wisdom to root and vegetate in. It is something 
as it is with the planting of an astronomical ob- 
servatory : however fine its equipment and what- 
ever the power of its lenses, we depend first of 
all upon the solidity with which the observatory 
is planted and its isolation from whatever may 
induce disturbance and tremor. 

The first and fundamental thing that the home 
has to do for the child in the way of education 
is, then, to help make of him a little moral verte- 
brate. There needs to be developed an osseous 
shaft running up and down him, that shall form 
the axis around which his growing personality 
shall gather itself in compactness and fixity. That 
will make the boy mean something, and make 
him mean more and more till the end of time 
and clear on into eternity. It is the only thing 
that will make him worth calling a personal in- 
teger. 

To learn to obey is the hardest, even as it is 
the most valuable, lesson a child can ever acquire. 
It is not only valuable for what it is in itself ; it 
is also valuable for what it serves as the basis of. 
One of the first things told us of Jesus has to do 



77 



with this same matter. It is related to us that he 
was subject to his parents, and the narrative im- 
mediately goes on to remark that he grew in 
wisdom, and in favor with God and men. The 
close juxtaposition of the two seems calculated 
to teach that obedience was the seed-kernel out 
of which his intelligence and holiness waxed. 



THE Bible is sown thick with this sort of sug- 
gestion. We cannot come into touch with 
Scripture or appreciate the facts of every-day life, 
as they come under our observation or within the 
scope of our experience, without beginning to 
wonder whether there is not something in this 
matter of requirements, and of unquestioning 
obedience to requirements, that is being con- 
siderably slurred over in the discipline wherewith 
we discipline ourselves and wherewith we disci- 
pline those that Providence has submitted to our 
authority. I am not finding fault with children 
for not wanting to obey ; I only say that the best 
lesson that parents can teach their children is to 
make them obey. Children are hired to do right 
and coaxed into doing as they are told to do; 
sometimes punished for disobedience, but coddled 
because the punishment hurts them. Communi- 
cations made to them by personal authority they 
are not encouraged to regard, except as those 




78 



communications are interpolated with explana- 
tions or wrapped around and disguised with 
downy filaments of sentiment and affection. 
This is no disparagement of affection, but there 
are personal necessities which no amount of the 
tenderer affectional qualities can begin to supply. 
Love may disguise the irksomeness of law, but it 
cannot abrogate law. It is in this matter as in 
the case of the perfection of the human face and 
head, which can be guaranteed by no delicacy 
of complexion or of beauteously molded tissues, 
except as they are fixed for their support upon 
the bones of the jaws, cheeks, forehead, and 
occiput. 



INTO whatever refinement of elegance we may 
build our house, the house will still depend 
for architectural effects upon its power to produce 
upon the observer a sense of perpendicular and 
horizontal. Architecture goes when we break 
with plumb-lines and rule out right angles. As 
has been capitally said, " Ornament construction, 
but do not construct ornament." And that is a 
maxim that has to be adopted into the production 
of young character. There shall be no disparage- 
ment of ornamentation, no depreciation of any 
of the comely graces, but prior to ornamentation 
we want construction, fixed lines, a gritty skele- 



79 



ton, upon which the molded tissues can be thrown 
and held in fixed security of utility and grace ; 
and that is to be wrought by law and not by love 
simply, yielding as its issue a certain unshakable- 
ness of character, such that when the shock of 
temptation comes it will take the blow without a 
recoil, as when the Lord himself stood up in the 
wilderness in front of the devil and buffeted him 
with three texts from the old Hebrew law. There 
is a quality in that scene which one can feel, and 
best feel without being drawn into any nice anat- 
omy of description of it. We see a live picture 
of it when we look upon a tree — some old giant 
oak, against which the storm- wind is hurling itself 
in hard and swift defiance, and the branches are 
all set swaying, and the twigs are twisted and 
wrenched, and the leaves sent fluttering and fly- 
ing; but underneath all this vegetable distress 
and leafy perturbation the perpendicular shaft of 
oaken timber lifts itself, and only accumulates 
the more solidity and rigidity from the blast with 
which it is lashed and the artillery with which it 
is bombarded. AVe want to find men genial and 
yielding and plastic ; but, with all of that, we need 
just as much to find in them a perpendicular shaft 
of moral determinedness, of such sort that when 
impinged upon there is no shadow of a chance 
of being able to go any further with them. The 
quality thus stated accrues to a man and to a 



So 



child by being held to the law, brought up upon 
it, fed upon it. Law is tonic ; it is iron in the 
blood. 



THIS lesson of law and obedience, then, is 
one that needs to combine with love in the 
very first instruction given to the child. A man's 
theology will, most likely, be only the enlargement 
of the conception that, as a boy, he had of his 
own father and mother. A child cannot be a 
jellyfish the first dozen years of his life and a 
vertebrate afterward. The child will not, to be 
sure, become a ihing of beauty unless he respires 
at home an atmosphere of affection ; but he will 
not become a thing of moral strength unless he 
respires at home an atmosphere of inflexible re- 
quirement, and unless he comes as consciously 
into contact with a will that is stronger than his 
own. When a boy hears his father say, " My 
son, do this," the impression made upon him 
needs to be like that made upon the old Hebrews 
by a "Thus saith the Lord." His father is the 
only almighty, practically, that the boy has dur- 
ing the first years of his life. Obedience is worth 
more than geography, and runs deeper and 
reaches higher than arithmetic or the classics. 
It is a thing a child will never learn, probably, 
unless he learns it at the beginning of life. 



VIII 
COMPULSION IN CHILD-TRAINING 

THE axis of character is moral, not mental. 
When it is a matter of child-training, there- 
fore, the first question is not on intellectual bright- 
ness, but on development of moral intensity. This 
ground was canvassed in the preceding article. 
I did not in that disparage the ordinary means 
and methods of mental discipline ; but the quality 
of the soil will condition the character of the 
products that issue from it, and the sure placing 
of the foundation-stone will determine both the 
solidity and the permanency of all the architecture 
imposed upon it. The ultimate worth of a man 
is the keenness and vigor of his moral intentions. 
It is at this point, then, that disciplinary effort 
has first to be laid out. Hence my insistence 
upon obedience. There is nothing that generates 
moral fiber like cordially doing as we are told. 
6 81 



82 



Children used to obey their parents. There is as 
much family government at present as there used 
to be, only now it has changed hands. It is far 
more important to train a child's will than it is to 
train his mind. He may alter his mind as he 
grows older, but he will not, probably, alter his 
will. Adult anarchy is nursery lawlessness come 
to the full corn in the ear. 



IN order to do this it is not necessary that au- 
thority and law should be put before the child 
in a manner calculated to irritate and offend. 
The atmosphere of the home should be as genial 
and summery as possible, but there is no more 
incompatibility between warmth and perpendic- 
ular lines in the domestic than in the natural 
world. 

Obedience, in the sense here intended, means 
an appreciation of that which is authoritative, 
and not only an appreciation of it, but a glad 
appreciation of it ; so that the will leans upon it 
and clings to it as the tendrils of the vine weave 
themselves into the trellis and win security and 
uplift from it. Authority is as strong a friend 
if yielded to as it is bitter an enemy if resisted. 
Everything in nature obeys. Everything in art 
obeys. Only man mutinies, and his mutiny is 
his misery— always has been since the first Adam 



«3 



mutinied, and always will be till the last Adam 
ceases to mutiny. 

It is often enough said that it is better to rule 
by love than fear. Without quarreling with 
parents upon that point, I recur to the point that 
it is essential that they rule. Unfortunately, in 
some instances ruling by love is not ruling at all, 
but a euphemism for permitting the children to 
do it in their parents' stead. Coaxing and hiring 
a child is not ruling him, even if he is brought 
by that means to do what he is told to do. The 
purpose of coaxing and lollypop in that connec- 
tion is to make him unconscious of authority ; the 
best thing that can befall a child is, on the con- 
trary, that he be conscious of authority. 

In all other arts it is very definitely understood 
that success is achievable only by the studied 
observance of established rules. If a man un- 
dertakes to learn to play the piano he submits 
his judgment to his teacher, and the degree of 
his submission will probably measure the rapidity 
of his success. So if he applies himself to me- 
chanic arts. Achievement in all these depart- 
ments is measured by surrender. It is passing 
strange that in the most difficult of all arts, that 
of becoming a man, it should be considered that 
the apprentice can be, for the most part, left to 
his own judgment ; that hampering a boy by rules 
and commandments weakens his powers of self- 



§4 



dependence and impairs his chances of personal 
success. There is a science of manhood and 
womanhood quite as much as there is of archi- 
tecture and navigation, and it passes all compre- 
hension how parents can appreciate the need of 
a rigid observance of precepts and principles in 
the latter cases and yet imagine that their boys 
and girls can be left in nine points out of ten to 
work out the problem of life in their own wild and 
uncontrolled way. If I may refer to my own 
experience, I was brought up to obey, and was 
punished if I did not obey — yes, was whipped if 
I did not obey. Whipping is healthy if soundly 
as well as affectionately administered. AH this 
talk about corporal punishment bruising a child's 
spirit is maudlin sentimentality and invertebrate 
balderdash. I am not arguing for parental 
brutality, but there is good Scripture authority 
for a generous use of the rod. and for every child 
that is harmed by being over- whipped I venture 
to say that there are ninety-nine injured by being 
under-whipped. 



IF I speak confidently and feelingly upon this 
point, it is because I know how much I owe 
personally to the fact of being brought up in a 
home where I was taught to appreciate the great- 
ness of righteous authority, the vastness of its 



§5 



meaning, the advantage of submitting to it, and 
the serious risk of resisting it. No anarchist 
could ever have graduated from the home I was 
born, loved, and chastised in. Such experience 
makes me pity the children who know no disci- 
pline but that of caresses and sweetmeats, and 
makes me more than pity the parents who have 
neither the discernment in their mental constitu- 
tion nor the iron in their moral constitution to 
perceive that nothing which a child can know or 
can win can begin to take the place of sense of 
superior authority, and of the holy right of that 
authority to be respected, revered, and obeyed. 
The moral strength of a man is measured pretty 
accurately by the cordial reverence with which 
he regards whatsoever has the right to call itself 
his master. Estimated by this criterion, the 
average American boy is a discouraging type of 
humanity, and is a severe reflection upon the 
crude attempts at manhood manufacture evinced 
by the typical American home. If our homes 
cannot turn out children that will respect author- 
ity, there will be no authority in a great while, 
either at home, in the State, or anywhere else, 
that will be worth their respecting. 

In crossing over now into the domain of the 
child's mental and manual training, we shall 
necessarily take with us some of the spirit which 
we have claimed ought to assert itself in his moral 

6* 



86 



discipline. The matter and methods of the child's 
schooling must be determined for him, and when 
the determination has been made it must be exe- 
cuted. His own will is no more fitted to be 
arbiter in matters of study than in matters of 
behavior. One of the purposes of intelligence in 
the parent or preceptor is to decide upon what 
line and in the use of what appliances the intel- 
lect of the child or pupil can be most wisely cul- 
tivated. That such a seeming truism should even 
admit of being announced only indicates the 
breadth of conceit into which young inexperience 
has expanded itself. A child, even a student in 
college, does not and cannot know the uses to 
which his intelligence will have eventually to be 
put, and therefore cannot know the direction that 
needs to be given to its unfolding. To let a child 
decide for himself what and how he will study is 
even more colossally stupid than to allow a child 
lost in the woods to find his own way out into 
the light. The rank and file of parents cannot, 
unfortunately, be expected to have acquired a 
great amount of the philosophy of education, but 
there are two or three things that even such 
parents ought to be put in the way of under- 
standing, and a number of other things that ought 
to be, more intelligently than they are, comprised 
in our system of public-school instruction. 



87 



CHILD instruction should in the first instance 
proceed upon the principle that the young 
mind is an incalculable possibility, and that 
schooling should be of a character to carry that 
possibility just as far as may be toward its reali- 
zation. The child's mind is as thickly studded 
with interrogation-points as the sky is with stars. 
The primary genius of a child is the genius for 
asking questions. There is a natural affinity be- 
tween the mind and the truth. Inquisitiveness 
is as natural to intelligence as hunger is to the 
stomach. One of the most common effects of 
current schooling is to destroy that affinity. In- 
tellectual stuffing in the nursery or in the school- 
room is worse and more wicked than gluttony in 
the dining-room. Children who commence going 
to school when they are six, and continue at it 
till they are sixteen, hate knowledge a good deal 
worse than they do sin, and if they had the cour- 
age of their impulses would assassinate their in- 
structors and practise nihilism on their school- 
rooms and text-books. The distinct symptoms 
of nihilism are discernible in every school-room 
that has been used for educational purposes more 
than six months. This intellectual demoraliza- 
tion of the school-room will pursue its present 
course till teachers are selected who have enough 
of the genius of Froebel to understand that the 
mental constitution of the child is itself prescrip- 



88 



tive of the course to be followed in its devel- 
opment, and that the proper office of school 
commissioners and school committees is to help 
the teacher to carry out the intentions of nature 
rather than to compel him to embarrass and con- 
trovert those intentions. 



AFTER all that can be said in behalf of a 
JT\. wide and roomy mental training for our 
children, it still remains an unfortunate fact that 
the struggle of life is so severe, and its competi- 
tions so taxing, that the vast percentage of chil- 
dren have to have their curriculum of instruction 
arranged with reference to the practical workaday 
experience which awaits them. Even though 
our circumstances be affluent, yet we are certain 
to encounter frequent problems whose solution 
will depend surely upon the fund of mental energy 
which has been stored up in our life's initial years. 
To whatever point we may have succeeded in 
carrying our education, its practical value consists 
primarily, not in the number of things we may 
have learned, nor the number of themes upon 
which we can speak intelligently or write edify- 
ingly, but upon the amount of intellectual brawn 
we have at our service, wherewith to meet the 
unheralded enemies and the sharp exigencies 
which make out so large a part of adult experi- 



ence. The greatest thing of a practical kind that 
a complete education does for us is to furnish us 
with resources applicable to uses not yet foreseen, 
nor even dreamed of while yet the resources were 
being secured. 



IN the measure that the conditions of life be- 
come more severe and irksome the relevancy 
of training to service needs to be increasingly 
studied. The general criticism to be passed upon 
the education furnished by our homes and by our 
primary and grammar schools is that it does not 
so qualify for the activities of life as to guarantee 
the graduate against dependence upon the poor- 
house or other means of charitable relief. Even 
during the hard financial strain of the past three 
years the great majority of those who have suf- 
fered have been those who have never been taught 
to do anything, or at least never been taught with 
a thoroughness that makes instruction convertible 
into terms of dollars and cents, bread and butter. 
There is no word too fine to be spoken in be- 
half of an all-round training, but as things are at 
present that is utterly out of the question with a 
tremendous majority of children, even with the 
children in the large majority of our own homes. 
The generic problem of the race is to keep soul 
and body together, and the school problem is 



9 o 



first of all to put the rising generation in the way 
of making the junction of the two possible. So 
long as the State assumes the care of paupers it 
is the duty of the State to use its best means to 
prevent the existence of paupers, and one of the 
most direct means to that end is to see to it that 
all the children in the State are thoroughly in- 
structed in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and 
are substantially trained in the practice of some 
form of remunerative handiwork. There is work 
enough to be done in this big world by people 
who are willing to work and who know how. 
The idea of immense wealth secured by some 
process of financial legerdemain has so pervaded 
the general atmosphere that a sufficiency has 
ceased to satisfy, and a young man resolves either 
to speculate his way to fortune or to steal some 
one else's fortune, or if both these expedients 
fail, to turn professional idler and subsist on 
charity. The incentive to substantial equipment 
for the struggle of life is thus withdrawn. If I 
were the State I would compel every child to 
acquire the means of an honest livelihood, even 
at the risk of the whip, and then if, having ac- 
quired that means, he failed to avail of it to his 
own maintenance. I would commit him to the 
workhouse and keep him at hard labor there till 
he experienced a change of heart. There is no 
respectable consistency between State's care of 



9 1 



the poor and State's neglect of stringent means 
for preventing the existence of the poor. If a 
government ought to be " paternal " to the extent 
of feeding paupers, it ought to be "paternal " to 
the extent of obliging possible or intending pau- 
pers to be able to feed themselves. The root 
difficulty in all this matter is the indisposition of 
parents and other constituted authorities to make 
serious business of laying substantial foundations in 
the early years of our young people, boys and girls. 
One of the chief sources of misery among the 
working- classes is the wife's ignorance of the 
duties that belong to her. She is ignorant of 
them because she has never been compelled to 
learn them. If we could split half of our pianos 
into kindling-wood, and pluck the strings out of 
three quarters of our harps, fiddles, and banjos, 
and set our young girls to the practical task of 
learning how to sew and cook and wash and iron, 
and of becoming proficient in a self-sustaining 
way upon some line or other of remunerative 
industry, it would be a great benison to society in 
general, and to their own souls in particular. In 
whatever direction we look and whatever im- 
provement in existing conditions we seek to effect, 
we come back to it again and again that the end 
is determined by the beginning and that the 
foundations of all public betterment have to be 
laid in the children. 



IX 

RELIGION IN THE FAMILY 



THE ground I have now to traverse is as 
necessary as it is delicate. All that has been 
said in the previous chapter regarding moral train- 
ing lacks support save as the matter is carried 
down to that underlying stratum of experience 
where are deposited the child's religious sensi- 
bilities. It may never be possible to state with 
exactness where the frontier lies between the re- 
lated territories of morality and religion, yet we 
all of us, probably, have the feeling that the two 
are not quite identical, and should very likely 
agree with one another that, while morality con- 
cerns itself with rules of duty, and is therefore 
apt to become rather uninteresting and irksome, 
religion brings us into relation with a personal 
something which lies back of those rules, asserts 
itself through them, and helps to communicate to 
them warmth and pressure. 
92 



93 



A SIMPLE illustration will best serve my 
purpose here ; for, while I do not want to 
embarrass the matter by fine distinctions, I know 
there will be a very practical advantage in being 
able to see clearly the way in which moral train- 
ing can bring religious reality to its own aid and 
quickening. I can suppose a child to have a task 
set before him requiring to be performed. Now, 
there are two ways in which the child can address 
himself to that task. There can be on his part 
merely the feeling of something that is to be 
done, a necessity that has to be met. Under 
those circumstances the duty stands to the child 
in a relation that is purely impersonal and is 
therefore absolutely barren of impulse and zest. 
Doing duty because it is duty has had a great 
many pleasant things said in its behalf, and it is 
doubtless heroic; but there is nothing about it 
that is either mellow or beautiful, and when work 
has been pursued along that line for a certain 
length of time it can be confidently expected to 
issue in weariness and a breakdown. Or the 
child can undertake his task in quite a different 
spirit. His duty can be felt by him, not as an im- 
personal necessity, but as being the expression 
of the wish or will of his own mother. This trans- 
lates performance into a distinct sphere. The 
child's movement now is in a region of personal- 
ity. Not only is the child himself personal, but the 



94 



pressure telling upon him is personal likewise ; and 
according to the measure in which the relation 
between that child and his mother is a filial and 
affectionate one, that maternal pressure becomes 
to him a quicken er and an inspiration. That 
gives us, in a small way, but with considerable ac- 
curacy, I venture to think, the difference between 
morality and religion. In the one case the 
ethical compulsions which dominate us are felt 
by us as full of impact, but void of soul. We 
do not so much obey them, for obedience involves 
the recognition on our part of a personal element 
in the authority to which our obedience is ren- 
dered ; we rather succumb to them, as a driven 
vessel succumbs to the blast that is pursuing it, 
or as an exposed Swiss hamlet goes down under 
the avalanche. 

Let me now turn aside for a moment and see 
in what an easy, practical way this principle will 
work in our particular matter of child religion. 
Children generally have more or less said to them 
about conscience. They are instructed to do 
what their conscience tells them to do, and to 
refrain from doing what their conscience forbids 
them to do. All of this is good, but how good 
will depend on the notion that in their minds is 
attached to the word " conscience." If the ex- 
pression just used is allowed to mean to them 
simply that they must do what they feel they 



95 



ought to do, and must leave undone what it seems 
to them wrong to do, the lugging in of that word 
"conscience" may amplify their vocabulary a 
little, but will hardly contribute to aid or beautify 
their behavior. But let them understand that the 
whispered compulsion working within them, that 
puts its gentle restraints and constraints upon 
them, is the still, small voice of God, and they 
will feel themselves placed instantly in the divine 
presence, and the holiness and solemnity of that 
presence will, to the degree in which it is experi- 
enced by them, procure in them an obedience 
which will be both easy and reverent. 

From the illustration just used, which, I think, 
will easily appeal both to the heart and the intel- 
ligence of any parent, it would be easy to go on 
and define religion as being the loyal sense of 
God's nearness to us in all the relations of life. 



THIS definition is too transparent ever to be 
credited with being profound — something, 
possibly, as water is never thought to be deep if 
it is so clear that one can see the bottom. How- 
ever that may be, it is a way of putting the matter 
that will be extremely serviceable in dealing re- 
ligiously with the children. It is a remarkable 
thing in regard to little people that it is almost 
never too early to approach them with religious 



96 



suggestion. It is not what we say to them that 
makes them religious ; it is the religious instinct 
already in them that makes intelligible to them 
whatever of a religious kind we say to them. 
The best that a child can become in this, as in 
every other respect, accrues from wisely handling 
and fostering some impulse already contained in 
the child's original dowry. If the beginnings 
of individual religion were not an instinct, no 
method of treatment, no ingenuity of culture, 
could suffice to establish such a beginning. Re- 
ligion can be immanent in the child, and even be 
a part of his experience, without his being able 
yet to know it as religion or being able to com- 
prehend the allusions made to it by his elders. 
There is an interesting suggestion along that line 
in what occurred in the history of little Samuel. 
Divine influences, we are told, began to be opera- 
tive in him, and to make themselves very dis- 
tinctly felt by him, before he was far enough 
along to be able to discriminate intellectually 
between what is human and what is divine. God's 
voice he took to be Eli's till Eli set him right. 
It holds in the twilight of life what is true in each 
dawning, that it begins to be morning a good 
while before there is sunshine enough in the air 
for the sun-dial to be able to tell us what o'clock 
it is. 



97 



IT is in keeping with the foregoing to say that 
the initial mistake which, as parents and 
teachers, we are continually making with the 
children, is in withholding from them religious 
suggestion till we are sure the way has been pre- 
pared for it by their advancing mental develop- 
ment. The fact is that the susceptibility to 
divine things antedates the appreciation of things 
human and finite. Whether in the life of the 
individual or in that of the race at large, religion 
is older than science. In all this it needs to be 
clearly understood that I am not talking about 
theology, but about religion, — about the loyal 
sense of God's nearness to us in all the relations 
of life, — which is as distinct from theology as 
vision is distinct from the science of optics. A 
remarkable commentary upon the truth we have 
just now in hand is found in the fact that when 
Christ wanted to discourse upon the text, " God 
is a Spirit," he selected as his auditor an ignorant 
Samaritan water-carrier. He could hardly have 
chosen a profounder theme, and hardly could he 
have chosen a hearer that, from an intellectual 
standpoint, would have been more imperfectly 
equipped for the suggestions he had to offer her. 
The. infant's eyes are full of light, waiting to be 
greeted by the light of the sun so soon as its lids 
are lifted. The heart of the child is tuned to the 
things of God, and its strings are ready to become 



9 8 



musical so soon as they are touched by a hand 
that knows how to stir them into resonance. It 
is a good while before the child and the earth 
come very close to one another, but, on the con- 
trary, "heaven lies about us in our infancy." So 
soon as we understand that religion begins in a 
child as a native tendency, a holy possibility, it 
is but a step to the conclusion that its unfolding 
will be first of all a matter of the atmosphere with 
which it is invested and overlaid. It is not, in 
the first instance, an affair of learning Sunday- 
school lessons, committing hymns, or even read- 
ing the Bible. The growths of the soul, like the 
growths of the ground, depend primarily upon 
climate. It is the religion that is constituently 
present and inherent in the home life that has to 
be relied upon first of all, and more than all else, 
as the means of leading out into vigor and grace 
the religious possibilities of the little dwellers in 
the home. And when I say "religion that is 
constituently present and inherent in the home 
life " I mean religion that is so interiorly wrought 
into the fiber of the home life that it never occurs 
to one to try to draw out the religious thread from 
the rest of the web and view it apart. Religion 
taken by itself is not a nice thing any more than 
the artist's pigment taken by itself is a nice thing, 
however exquisite in its effects that pigment may 
become when it has been diffused and wrought 



99 

into the tissue of the canvas. That is one par- 
ticular reason why children often do not like re- 
ligion and do not come under its power: it is 
exhibited to them in bulk ; it is too palpable ; it 
is bunched instead of becoming a diffusive pres- 
ence by being an organic constituent in the entire 
life of the home. There are families, a great 
many of them, — would that there were more, — 
where the religious effect wrought upon one is 
very much like the effect which the light produces 
upon us on a bright day ; which is so distributed, 
and so hides itself in the various complexion 
which it puts upon all the objects of nature 
standing in its pathway, that, although won- 
drously brightened ourselves by the splendid 
revelation, we can go about in the midst of it all 
without a single distinct thought, perhaps, of the 
sunshine which has made all this splendor pos- 
sible. 



FAMILY religion of the kind now being con- 
sidered is one in which everything which 
occurs and everything which exists is thought of, 
and frankly and pleasantly spoken of, as inter- 
woven with threads of divine power, love, and 
intention. I have instanced this in my reference 
to conscience. The same thing may be accom- 
plished in another way by accustoming the child 



to think of the events in nature, such as the leaf- 
ing out of the trees in spring, their growth during 
the summer, the falling of the rain, the coming 
out of the stars at evening, as being parts of the 
ways in which God is wisely and kindly at work 
in the great and beautiful world that he has made 
and that he is taking care of. Religion is, to a 
considerable extent, nothing more nor less than 
the habit of associating God with whatever is and 
with whatever transpires, and the little, susceptible 
heart of the child is perfectly ready to be guided 
along the track of such a habit. One of the 
finishing features of this mode of religious train- 
ing is that it is so exquisitely simple. There is 
no straining after effects, and yet by this process 
the child easily learns to snuggle up to what is, 
after all, the real heart of all this religious matter. 



IT may be wise, although perhaps not neces- 
sary, to say that this is not to be taken as a 
plea against distinct acts or services of religion. 
I am not trying to preclude prayer, nor the stated 
reading and study of the Scriptures, and the like ; 
but family religion falls short of the holy reality 
it admits of being so long as distinctive " religious 
exercises " are conceived of as being, not its ex- 
pression and outcome, but its very substance. 
Domestic religion, in order to be genuinely such, 



101 



is a part of the home's permanent condition, a 
continuous ingredient in its life. Periodic family- 
devotions, for instance, are not family religion, 
but, provided they are sincere, one method which 
that religion takes of asserting and evincing itself, 
something as the blossoms on a tree, more or less 
regular in the time of their appearing and in the 
mode of their distribution, are not that tree's life, 
but one of the forms under which that life, which 
is an unintermittent thing, comes to its manifes- 
tation. Now the important thing to notice is 
that only that religion in the home which is felt 
to be a pervasive and permanent reality is calcu- 
lated to induce in the children a religion which 
shall be a constituent (and therefore ineradicable) 
element of their personality. I am arguing for 
a religion that is so wrought into the structure of 
the child's being that the religion cannot stop till 
the child stops. We hear a good deal in these 
days about young people losing their religious 
faith and becoming skeptical, agnostic, or even 
atheistic. I have now reached the point in my 
discussion where I am able to put a firm hand 
on the very root of the difficulty. Any man or 
woman, young or old, is liable to lose his or her 
religion if that religion is anything other than a 
constituent part of his or her own personal being. 
You never hear of a person's losing his backbone. 
Backbone cannot disappear except as the man 

7* 



disappears. Backbone cannot die except as the 
man dies. It is a constituent and therefore an 
indestructible part. It is in such manner a part 
of the whole that the whole depends upon it for 
its own integrity and continuity. But, while a 
man cannot lose his backbone, he can lose his 
baggage. One is an ingredient ; the other is 
nothing but an accident. Now that illustrates, 
as distinctly as any reader will require, the dif- 
ference between religion that is ingrained and 
religion that is adopted. The latter is principally 
an affair of holding certain doctrines and per- 
forming certain religious exercises. As to the 
religious exercises, change of surroundings is 
easily able to work their discontinuance ; and as 
to doctrinal opinions, if one intellectual atmo- 
sphere induces them, a contrary intellectual at- 
mosphere can just as readily wither and dissipate 
them. The only religion that can be counted 
upon with absolute confidence to stay is the 
religion whose fibers were delicately woven in 
among the tender threads of the young life, mu- 
tually intertwined, fostered by a home atmosphere 
intrinsically religious, and as sure of its future as 
it is established in its grounds. 



X 



THE FATHER'S DOMESTIC 
HEADSHIP 



ONE criticism passed upon this series of arti- 
cles, as thus far produced, has been that it 
loads the wife and mother with an undue burden 
of responsibility and seems to leave the father 
practically exempt. While denying that any 
burden has been laid upon her that she is not 
peculiarly and providentially fitted to bear, it is 
certainly true that her obligations, in the form 
in which I have attempted to state them, are 
onerous and exacting. It must be remembered, 
however, that a considerable element of the sex 
is just now clamoring for a new and larger do- 
main of responsibility, and there seems to be a 
good deal of fitness in availing of this juncture to 
remind them that they will have to do a good 
deal more than they have yet done in order 
handsomely and completely to occupy the terri- 
103 



io4 



:::y :hat is already accorded to them and that is 
physiologically and temperamentally marked out 
for them. We have all seen a goodly number of 
admirable wives and mothers, but we have prob- 
ably scarcely seen one who could not have been 
a great deal larger and more accomplished than 
she was without its being necessary for her to 
have a wider territory of exertion in order to 
evince and exercise all there was in her. I have 
taken no ground against woman's doing anything 
and even-thing that the most demonstrative and 
high-keyed representatives of her sex aspire to. 
In particular, I have not even uttered a word 
against so serious an innovation as that of 
woman's going to the polls. I have only tried 
to show the infinite stretch of opportunity that 
opens before her in the line of sen-ice which the 
general instinct and the revealed word of God 
show to be primarily pertinent to her. When 
the sex has succeeded in doing perfectly what 
God and nature evidently intended to have her 
do, it will be ample time for her to think about 
doing some things upon which God and nature 
have expressed themselves less definitely. 



STILL, no urgency with which I have pressed 
the matter of woman's domestic accounta- 
bility has been intended to relieve the other sex 



!°5 



of an equal, not to say paramount, accountability 
in the same field. The head of the family is not 
the mother, but the father. The husband is the 
house-band— a mode of representation which 
exhibits the home as securing its final unity and 
stability in and around the father. In every 
well-ordered household the man will defer to the 
woman, and the woman will defer to the man, 
and there will be a good deal of domestic reci- 
procity, that will admit of being pleasantly illus- 
trated by what is known in astronomy as binary 
stars, wherein each member of a stellar couplet 
bends to the other and revolves about the other. 
But when we have amplified all that we consis- 
tently can along that line, it yet remains that it 
is the man, and not the woman, that is intended 
to be the house-band, and that the husband and 
father is the point of final determination. The 
Bible teaches us that this is so. All men know 
that this is so. Most women know that this is 
so, and such women as do not have presentiments 
to that effect, and go about with voices pitched 
sufficiently high to dull and deaden the note of 
those presentiments. I should have no object in 
denying that the instances are numerous wherein, 
as matter of fact, the mother is more distinctively 
the controlling and shaping energy of the family 
than the father, and better fitted to be such, 
which is only to say — what everybody knows — 



io6 



that there are masculine women and effeminate 
men. Nature sometimes tumbles together, in 
one bundle of individuality, physiological ele- 
ments that belong to one sex and temperamental 
ingredients that are the property of the other. 
But the purposes of nature are not to be inferred 
from her mistakes, and her regular productions 
indicate it as her intention that the father should 
be that determinative column of strength in which 
not only the wife and mother shall win her best 
support, but around which mother and children 
both shall secure the finished coherency of per- 
fect familyhood. If in this representation there 
is a dash of ideality, yet the lines here drawn 
cannot be said to be widely out of parallelism 
with the transparent intention of God's word, 
and it will certainly be found that the sweetest 
and strongest homes are those in which the 
criterion thus stated comes nearest to its reali- 
zation. 



IN all satisfactory and thorough treatment of 
the relations with which we have here to 
deal, it has to be remembered that the man and 
the woman stand to one another in a comple- 
mentary relation. Each is expressive of only a 
part of those elements of character required to 
compose a complete personality. The mistake 



107 

which a man makes in trying to be womanly, and 
the far more frequent mistake which a woman 
makes in trying to be manly, springs from the 
assumption that it requires the elements of but a 
single sex in order to the production of all-round 
character. Sex is limitation, and to proceed as 
though it were not has debilitated the manliness 
of some men and ruined the womanliness of a 
good many women. If, now, I were to venture 
to specify the distinctive feature of the masculine 
and feminine sexes respectively, I should say, 
strength and grace. This does not mean neces- 
sarily that the woman is a weakling or the man 
a monstrosity, but that vigor and delicacy are 
the threads respectively upon which the qualities 
of the two are predominantly strung. Whether 
our thought be upon physical, mental, or moral 
characteristics, we do not like a man whose char- 
acter can be designated by the word " delicacy," 
nor a woman whose character can be summarized 
by the term " strength." 

In this are indicated in general though distinct 
terms the relations which the father and mother 
are to sustain respectively toward the household. 
The mother, whether in her material or personal 
structure, is to be primarily the expression of all 
that makes for beauty, delicacy, and grace of 
character and life. The father, on the contrary, 
it is right to expect, will be the exponent of 



io8 



whatever can be best stated by such terms as 
"vigor," "strength," and "authority." The 
father will be the law of the home, and the 
mother its gospel. 



THE homes in which we have many of us 
been brought up are such that we under- 
stand what is meant by saying that when we 
were children our father was to us a kind of 
Old Testament, and our mother a sort of New 
Testament. However much we loved our fa- 
ther, our access to him was not of quite the 
same close order, probably, as in the case of 
our mother. Oftentimes, indeed, we approached 
him through her. We induced her to speak in 
our behalf, which is again an interesting reminder 
of what we find on theological ground in the 
employment of a New Covenant intercessor in 
order to reach the Old Covenant Jehovah. I do 
not refer to this analogy between things in the 
family and things in the heavens because I lay 
great stress upon it ; at the same time the coinci- 
dence, if it be but a coincidence, is interesting. 
A great deal of the gist of high and divine matters 
is traceable in minuter shape upon exceedingly 
lowly and human ground. Even the Fatherhood 
of God has been generally conceived as some- 
what distanced from us, and we have depended 



109 



upon a Christ, or upon the " divine mother " of 
our Lord, to bridge the interval. In the economy 
of heaven, and similarly in that of the earthly 
home, we have an instinctive sense that approach 
to the place of authority and power must be 
mediated by motherly intervention. 



WHILE, perforce of ordinary circumstance, 
the father's duties will hold him consider- 
ably apart from the contacts of home life, yet 
whatever successes he may achieve outside will 
not atone for any failure on his part to regard his 
home as the prime sphere of his obligation and 
the point around which his devotements will 
cluster in distinguished earnestness and con- 
stancy. Whatever he may have achieved in 
his art, trade, profession, or other engagement, 
the man who stands at the head of a household 
has been, in the broad sense of the term, a failure 
if he has not been a true husband and a wise, 
strong, and devoted father. It cannot be a suc- 
cessful home where the mother looks after the 
children and the father looks after his business. 
The most productive services rendered are always 
personal, and any amount of exertion expended 
outside in providing for the necessities of the 
home will not take the place of that tuitional 
ministry which comes only by the direct and con- 



no 



tinuous contact of father with child. However 
complete a woman may be as a mother, there are 
qualities of character which the father will com- 
municate to his children that the mother will be 
less able to do, as well as less intended to do. 



UNDOUBTEDLY there is a certain division 
of labor which will prove equally advan- 
tageous in domestic administration as in the 
conduct of any other class of affairs, and it will 
be to the peace of the household and to the suc- 
cessful running of its machinery that that divi- 
sion should be pretty distinctly made and not 
too frequently interfered with or departed from. 
But when it comes to the matter of developing 
in the children their young possibilities of man- 
hood and womanhood, the father, as well as the 
mother, has a constant and indispensable part to 
play. Neither can substitute for the other. The 
contribution toward personal character respec- 
tively rendered by them will be widely differ- 
enced, but each will be an absolute essential. As 
already intimated, the bone and sinew of char- 
acter will probably be a quotation from the father, 
and the delicate tissue with which it is overlaid 
will as likely be a bequest from the mother. 
Without unduly pressing this distinction, it has 
nevertheless its sure basis in the facts of the case, 
and the father who relegates to the mother the 



personal upbuilding of his children, without be- 
coming himself an intimate factor in their con- 
stant life, ill deserves the paternal dignity that 
has been put upon him, and entails upon his 
children a legacy of defect which no maternal 
solicitude nor effort will quite avail to supply. 



IT is the father who makes out the point of 
connection between the home and the great 
outside world with its large purposes and pas- 
sionate competitions. While the home is the 
mother's world, the world has also to be the 
father's home, and it is the relation which he 
sustains toward the world, and the character with 
which he comports himself in it, that will go far 
toward determining whether the children, par- 
ticularly the sons, as they come to mature years, 
will subject the world to the behests of large and 
sterling principle, or whether they will become 
themselves slaves of the world, torn by its dis- 
tractions and dragged at the wheel of its despo- 
tizing ambitions. It is life, and not precept, that 
gives to the boy his bent. Solomon could cover 
an entire acre with astute and prudent proverbs, 
but that was of no account with his son Reho- 
boam, who took his cue from his father's behavior 
and not from his father's philosophy. Boys love 
their mother and believe abstractly in all the 
sweet and virtuous lessons learned at their 



112 



mother's knee, but the world is so different a 
place from the home that, once the boy has begun 
to get out into it, home virtue gradually comes 
to appear impracticable — a sort of d^ess-parade 
affair, that is too delicate in its texture and too 
fine in its finish to sustain the rough usage of 
common, workaday life. He would scorn to he 
or be tricky in his dealings indoors, but immedi- 
ately he gets out of doors new combinations con- 
front him, new exigencies challenge him; he 
finds that smartness plays the role that in his 
domestic surroundings he had always seen ac- 
corded to forbearance and truthfulness ; and, not 
because the boy is bad, but because he has come 
into circumstances which he thinks his mother 
does not understand, where methods seem neces- 
sary that are hewn to a wider gauge than she could 
be presumed to feel the need of, he continues to 
believe in fireside virtue such of the time as he 
is at home, and inclines to its replacement by a 
rougher and more flexible type of virtue to be 
used in the contacts and exigencies of business. 



VOW it is just at this juncture that even-thing 
lM practically depends on the father. The 
boy loves his mother probably more than he does 
his father, but so far as relates to the affairs of 
life in general and on its hard side he has ten 



!3 



times the confidence in his father's practical and 
available wisdom that he has in that of his mother. 
And if his father finds it necessary in the conduct 
of business to strain one or two of the command- 
ments, the boy will keep on repeating the com- 
mandments to his mother, and commence break- 
ing them with his father, and that, too, without 
feeling that the sinuosity of the procedure involves 
any great amount of inconsistency. As it seems 
to him, he is only doing what a man on his travels 
does with his watch, which he sets according to 
the longitude of the region he happens at any 
time to be in, without any suspicion of having 
done violence either to meteorological or horo- 
logical principles. The only thing that will save 
the boy, and hold him in such a way true to the 
fixed pole of rectitude that no considerations of 
place or circumstance can deflect him > is that he be 
under the domination of a father whose life in the 
midst of the world incarnates the principles learned 
from the mother in the midst of the home. The boy 
will believe in the feasibility of his mother's doc- 
trine of righteousness if he sees his father take it 
out and exemplify it under the stress of business. 
The father's life to this degree measures the 
power of the mother's tuition, and is as the hand 
of God hastening or postponing the fulfilment of 
her maternal longings and prayers for the children 
of the household. 



XI 

THE PASSION OF MONEY-GETTING 



THE topic thus stated falls naturally within 
the scope of this series of articles, for the 
reason that it is home influence alone that can 
be trusted to deal in any manner of thoroughness 
with the involved evil and peril. The acquisition 
of wealth, in the form and animus with which it 
is being currently conducted, is distinctly a pas- 
sion, which is to say that it is an impulse so 
earnest and heated in its energy as to defy the 
restraints both of reason and of conscience. It 
is at once a mental and a moral mania. Like 
most other forms of insanity, the passion of ac- 
quisition may be expected in any specific instance 
to prove incurable. Any passion, once estab- 
lished, to such degree vitiates the organism in 
which it is rooted as to transform it from its 
natural estate into a condition of intellectual and 
ii4 






"5 



ethical irresponsibility. Sensuality is a disease; 
alcoholism is a disease ; money-getting is a dis- 
ease. It is a disease that feeds upon its own 
work of disintegration. It is like the flame of a 
candle, which wins support from the very wax 
which it consumes. A confidential friend of mine 
once told me that he felt himself to be just on 
the verge of breaking down with the malady. 
He had accumulated quite a fortune without 
having yet been made irrational or vicious by it, 
but he told me that he was beginning to detect 
the premonitory symptoms of such an issue. He 
was still rational enough to know that he was 
becoming unreasonable, and principled enough 
to know that it would not take a great deal to 
make of him a rascal. At this critical juncture 
he had the good sense and sufficient moral cour- 
age to go out of business. 



SUCH a step may not ordinarily be good 
policy, so long, at any rate, as one continues 
in the possession of ordinary powers, but it was 
good policy for him, and the only policy that, as 
a man of brains and integrity, was open to him. 
He had a keen sense of the tide that was weav- 
ing its energies about him, and knew that to 
hang longer upon the outer rim of the maelstrom 
would be to become eventually engulfed by it, 



n6 



without possibility of rescue. It is for that reason 
that what is done to contravene the passion of 
acquisition must be done as a preventive rather 
than as a restorative, and must, therefore, be done 
where the best constructive moral work always is 
done, namely, in the home. One way of accom- 
plishing this is by fostering among the children 
habits of beneficence. They will have to get 
before they can give, to be sure, but getting never 
becomes a passion so long as it is held under the 
constant correction of bestowment. Giving is a 
thing to be learned just as much as is walking or 
writing. Virtues are the products of practice. 
What a man is at twenty is the summary of what 
he has been doing the previous nineteen years. 
We are schooled by our own behavior. A man's 
character is the sum total of his fixed habits. 
Everything begins in action, and when the action 
has been repeated times enough it becomes an 
established and ineradicable bent of thought and 
demeanor. It is in that sense that our own acts 
are our real teachers and disciplinarians. What 
we amuse ourselves by calling our dispositions 
are often only the resultant of doing a great 
many times over — a great many thousand times 
over, perhaps— certain things that we began to 
do and were taught to do while we were yet 
children. When we were still in our first years 
we began, perhaps, to tell the truth— were taught 



H7 



to do so. We were so held to that line, and told 
the truth so many times, that we got in the way 
of doing so; that is, it became a habit with us. 
There was established in us a set in that direction. 
There may have been in us no more original 
truthfulness than there was in some neighbor of 
ours who possibly never tells the truth except 
when he forgets himself or blunders into it. The 
same holds of stealing. I am not a thief for the 
simple reason that I never learned to steal. If a 
man is honest at forty, it is because he early 
learned to let alone what did not belong to him 
and has never lost that habit. What a man is 
when he dies is principally the product of all his 
anterior conduct. This, then, is what was meant 
by saying a moment ago that a man's character 
is the summary of his fixed habits. In no aspect 
of life does this principle hold more strenuously 
than in that of beneficence. We are trained into 
generosity by our own acts of giving. 



MEN get in the way of giving. Children get 
in the way of giving, and then their lives 
run in the groove that early acts of kindly dis- 
bursement have worn for them. That is exactly 
what we mean by habit — morally sliding in the 
groove that our own repetitious act has worn 
for us. 

8* 



n8 



We are not honest except as a result of doing 
honestly. We are not generous except as a re- 
sult of doing generously. No quality becomes 
an element in our own character except by the 
preliminary of practising it. More of the dif- 
ference between generous and stingy people lies 
in this than is generally appreciated. No one of 
us can do well or easily a thing that we have not 
learned how to do. That thing may be the lifting 
of a twenty-pound dumb-bell or the contribution 
of a dollar. It is for this reason that with many 
people the giving of a moneyed gift makes them 
so tired. They are not necessarily bad people, 
but the moral muscles that come into play in 
motions of generosity have with them never been 
trained. Our natures being what they are, there 
is a necessary strain involved in parting with what 
is ours till the doing of it has been continued so 
long that the act becomes automatic. We might 
as well understand that there is no particular 
difference in this respect between learning to be 
generous and learning to spell or learning to solve 
problems in arithmetic or algebra. People natu- 
rally selfish are not "converted" into benefi- 
cence, any more than boys who cannot put three 
letters together in the right order are " converted " 
into good spellers. 

There is a little friend of mine, still a boy at 
home, with whom it is a fixed fact in his life to 



"9 

give away a definite percentage of all the money 
that comes into his hands. Quite a considerable 
sum came to him recently, and it was feared that 
he might be inclined to scale down the propor- 
tion ; but the momentum previously acquired was 
sufficient to counterbalance contrary pressure, and 
there is no special reason to fear that he will jump 
the track in any emergency to come. 



A MAN cannot be trusted to do right in this 
or in any other particular till he can do right 
easily, that is to say, until it has become his habit 
to do right. Giving cannot be left to impulse 
any more than spelling can be left to impulse. 
We have seen what might be called impulsive 
spellers, and they make just the same wretched 
work with orthography that impulsive giving 
makes with charity. Nor is the purpose sub- 
served by putting into the child's hands as a 
gratuity the money that he is expected to bestow 
as a beneficence. Merely letting money go 
through his hands will not make him charitable 
any more than letting water slip through a lead 
pipe will make the lead fertile. The act that is 
going to strengthen the little boy giver or the 
little girl giver in the direction of a matured 
generous disposition must be an act in which the 
actor feels that he is parting with something that 



20 



is his own. no: something which he is merely 
handling in the capacity of agent. It is a very 
common thing, if there is a beggar at the door 
to whom a pittance is to be given, or a gathering 
in the church or the Sunday-school where the 
contribution-box is to be passed, for the child to 
obtain from his father or mother the requisite 
penny, and then for the child and parent both to 
imagine that the child was somehow involved in 
and disciplined by the penny's conferment. The 
child in the Sunday-school does not learn to give 
in that way any more than the child in the spelling 
class learns to spell by the bare mimicry of the 
letters that the teacher herself puts into the child's 
mouth. 



TT^E learn to spell by making the spelling act 
\ \ our act. We learn to give by making 
the giving act our act. It is hoped that this 
truism will touch a vibrating chord in the intelli- 
gences and hearts of parents. The world is full 
of moneyed men, but really, great as is the 
amount bestowed in benefaction, it sustains a 
very feeble ratio to the amount that men and 
women bestow on themselves; and it is not be- 
cause these people are intentionally sordid and 
have no blood in their hearts, but because years 
ago, when they were children, their parents 



imagined that, while schooling would be neces- 
sary in order to qualify their offspring to read 
and write, no schooling in particular would be 
necessary in order to educate them into the far 
more difficult capability of parting with their own 
possessions in the interests of and for the better- 
ing of others — safeguarding the lesser, trusting to 
chance for the greater. 



PARENTS can also check in their children the 
tendency toward this passion by taking care 
not to treat the amenities of life and the powers 
and accomplishments of mind as expressible in 
terms of dollars and cents. This has a particular 
bearing upon fathers in their relation to their 
sons. There is no easier nor surer way of con- 
vincing a boy that money-getting is, the supreme 
art than for him to have his training and school- 
ing shaped with exclusive reference to fitting him 
to practise the art. It is not necessary for the 
boy to realize distinctly what such a mode of 
procedure means, and still less is it necessary for 
his father to tell him in so many words that 
school training is worth only what it will fetch in 
shekels; that way of estimating the matter will 
usurp a place in the boy's mind, and the usurpa- 
tion will become all the more despotic and irre- 
sistible for having initiated itself insidiously. The 



122 



ideas that master us the most imperiously are the 
ideas that were planted in us without our know- 
ing when, and that go on deepening their roots 
within us without our knowing how. The situa- 
tion here mentioned is one that I often encounter 
in conversation with business men who are con- 
sidering the question of their sons' education. I 
am often told by them, especially if they are not 
themselves college-bred, that, as their plan is to 
fit their sons for a mercantile career, the only 
college they have any intention of sending them 
to is a business college. We have nothing to do 
here with the question as to whether a man's 
business chances are improved or impaired by a 
liberal education. There is a good deal to be 
said on both sides of that dispute. The question 
we have in hand just now is larger and looks 
further. We are considering the effect which is 
going to be had upon the boy by being led to 
feel that the value of his training, whether it be 
obtained in a business college or in any other 
kind of a college, is determinable by the amount 
in cash, stocks, and securities in which it may 
be expected ultimately to eventuate. That is an 
indirect— but none the less effective for being 
indirect— way of telling the boy that money is so 
transcendently great a thing that the only value 
that anything else can have is its efficiency in 
contributing to that end. It is an indirect way 






123 

of telling him that the only value of an idea, the 
only value of a mental energy, the only value of 
a disciplined brain, in fact, is its cash value; 
which amounts substantially to listing intelligence 
and putting it upon the market in mercantile 
competition with wheat, leather, and railroad 
stock. Of course there is no such intention as 
this on the part of parents when they hurry their 
sons into the store or the banking-house or on to 
the exchange, but the effect just stated comes, 
is bound to come, and is damning in its conse- 
quences ; and it is monumentally unaccountable 
why intelligent parents, and especially intelligent 
Christian parents, are so stupidly slow in fore- 
casting the logical issue. 



THERE is something so almost fiendishly 
engrossing about the practice of money- 
making that it seems as though the intelligent 
and affectionate friends of such as are destined to 
this pursuit, instead of trying to narrow and pen 
in the powers, interests, and sympathies of the 
prospective trader, banker, or broker, would do 
everything possible toward multiplying the objects 
of his interests and widening the channel of his 
sympathies. Men go crazy because their regards 
are held so tenaciously and so acuminatedly upon 
a single point. Men go money-crazy because 



124 



they think and dream money so constantly and 
engrossedly that, like a spring inundation trying 
to work itself off through a narrow river-bed, the 
torrent breaks bit and bridle, and what might 
have been a prolific fountain of irrigation precipi- 
tates itself in a frenzy of inundation. If a man 
has been so trained as to have his interests mul- 
tiplied and the area that appeals to his regard 
widened, it may be that he will not work quite so 
concentratedly in his counting-house, or pile up 
his assets with quite the same celerity. If he 
loves his country a little, lays himself out in be- 
half of his city occasionally, or acquaints himself 
with the events that are engaging the attention 
of the world at large, or does a little something 
toward informing himself upon questions of 
artistic or scientific interest and toward keeping 
up with the life of the world, it will probably 
follow that the enlargement of his regard will 
cost him a corresponding contraction of his purse. 
Concentration is doubtless the secret of acquisi- 
tion ; but if convergence urged to a certain ex- 
treme becomes mania, then the only rational 
preventive will be divergence, and that preventive 
wants to be applied early, before the energies 
have hammered themselves down to a hot point. 
If John Smith the boy learns to be intelligently 
interested in a great many things, John Smith as 



i 2 5 



a man will never burn himself up in one thing ; 
and wide, rational sympathies learned at home 
are the surest security against narrow, mani- 
acal rapacity on the street and in the counting- 
house. 



XII 

MEMORIES OF OUR CHILDHOOD 
HOMES 



IT has seemed to me that there is no way in 
which this series of articles could be more 
fitly concluded than by devoting these finishing 
pages to a mention of some of the quiet effects 
that in our adult years remain with us from the 
scenes and experiences of our childhood. Hardly 
any more eloquent testimony could be given to 
the essential sincerity of human nature than that 
which is afforded by the restful satisfaction with 
which we dwell upon the simple life and the 
unseasoned enjoyments that marked our earlier 
years. However different our surroundings may 
be now from what they were then, and whatever 
increase there may have been in the matter of 
comforts, or even of luxuries, still there was a 
certain naturalness and wholesomeness about 
those earlier experiences that impress us with 
126 



127 



more and more of effect as we move further away 
from them. Perhaps we should not like to live 
now as we had to live then, but that does not 
prevent our realizing that a great deal of what 
we are now, and by far the better part of what 
we are now, we owe to the quietude and healthful 
simplicity that marked the duties and pleasures 
which made up our childhood. It took little then 
to make us happy, and our happiness was of a 
very happy kind. Our enjoyments were of the 
most unelaborate and inexpensive sort, but all of 
that was more than compensated for by the fresh, 
hearty, tingling nerves to which our unsophisti- 
cated amusements made their appeal. 



I REMEMBER a simple little woodcut that 
hung in my chamber. It was not much of a 
picture, and the frame was not any better, but it 
was an honest picture. " My Kitten " was the 
title of it ; and among all the paintings that since 
that time it has been my pleasure to inspect in 
the great galleries of Europe, there is none whose 
remembrance is so close to me or so dear to me 
as that. Undoubtedly the explanation of much 
of this is that in those first years the down is all 
on the peach, and our powers of appreciation are 
full of warm alertness; but that is just the im- 
portant feature of it all, and it is that which 



128 



makes those early, sweet home days so regnant 
over all the years that draw on afterward : they 
hang the inner walls with pictures that never fade. 
Notwithstanding that we have so much to do 
with the world outside, nothing comes so close to 
us, or stays by us so faithfully, as the impressions 
that are put upon the sensitive plate of our own 
spirits. Memory makes of each man's mind a 
picture-gallery, and the pictures in that gallery 
that we never take down and never find the need 
of having retouched are the ones that were earliest 
put in place and which we never allow any later 
associations to overlap or obscure. There is no 
such enduring service we can do for one as early 
furnishing him interiorly with those etchings, 
those "pleasant pictures," upon which his eye 
can always rest in tranquillity and wholesome 
delight, and to which the years as they go will 
only add distinctness and impart a fuller tone. 

That was one of the advantages of the old- 
fashioned, country way of living: that our ex- 
perience was so uniform, and our surroundings so 
unaltered from day to day and from year to year, 
that not only the house we lived in, but all the 
thousand and one accompaniments that com- 
bined to compose our home, had time ineffaceably 
to daguerreotype themselves in our thoughts, and 
even in our hearts. A good many of the well- 
to-do children that are growing up now never 



129 



live long enough in one place to give chance for 
a " time exposure." They stay awhile here and 
awhile there, and a good deal of the time are on 
the road. By this means the scenes through 
which they move are too evanescent to score a 
photographic record that will stay. Aside from 
this is the fact that in the case of city-bred chil- 
dren there is little of that individuality about the 
home that is needed in order that the mental 
camera may have a well-marked object for it to 
focus itself upon. A city home does not mean 
anything in particular. It may be warm and 
bright and cozy on the inside, with no end of 
jaunty furnishings and expensive bric-a-brac, but 
the same things are on exhibition next door, and 
in all the houses on the block, probably. 



IT takes a good deal to make a home. It needs 
something even besides father and mother, 
and an open fire, and the cat on the hearth, and 
the aforementioned museum. The first element 
in the home is the house itself, which needs to be 
distinctly different from any other house in sight. 
Associations never cluster about a building that 
is simply one of a row of duplicates. Then there 
needs to be some land around a house before it 
can be "real homy." It is well if there is so 
much land around it that all you can see of your 



130 



next-door neighbor's house is the smoke from his 
chimney as it curls up through the trees. That 
gives play-room for the eyes as well as for the 
feet. There ought also to be a generous sprin- 
kling of big trees, and somewhere about a dense 
forest for childish imagination to brood mysteries 
in. A wide range of solemn woods will do more 
for a child in a week than yellow bricks and dirty 
paving-stones will do for him in a year, or ever 
do for him. It is a great thing for a child to 
grow up within earshot of a babbling brook. 
There is a kind of musicalness of spirit that will 
become his in that way that he will never be able 
to acquire from a piano-teacher or a fiddling- 
master. This wide range of prospect will also 
companion him with the bright and the more 
earnest moods of the great mother earth on 
whose bosom he is being nourished. He will 
have opportunity to see the days brighten in the 
east in the morning, and his soul will uncon- 
sciously absorb some of the glory of the setting 
sun. Children in the city hardly ever see the sun 
come up or go down. It simply grows light 
about the time they have to get up, and grows 
dark a dozen or so hours later. To a child in 
the country there is likewise opportunity to see 
it rain. There is a great difference between rain 
and falling water. All we see in the city is 
falling water. I never see it rain in New York 
but I wonder how much sewage it will wash off 



i3i 



into the North and East rivers. Rain in the city- 
is only wetness broken loose, and is calculated 
only in terms of street-cleaning and aqueduct- 
supply. A square mile of rain or a dozen square 
miles is a different matter, and is unconsciously 
construed by the child as being a mood of nature's 
mind rather than a hydropathic uncorking. Still 
more impressive upon the child's mind are the 
strange communications made to him by the 
lightning flashing above him across a hundred 
miles of country sky, and the weird aurora, and 
the swift and blazing track of "falling stars," 
that make him feel how solemnly close to him is 
the great, wonderful world above the woods and 
the clouds. In all of this I am not imagining 
nor extemporizing, but only translating into words 
the pictures painted upon my own mind by the 
surroundings of my boyhood. Such pictures I 
would not exchange for the finest and most classic 
touches ever put upon canvas. They are fraught 
with nobility and purity, and they weave them- 
selves into the tissue of the child's being through 
all the loom-work of young years. 



THERE are frescos also, of a yet mellower 
tint, wrought by loved scenes which lie 
around the child's growing years in still closer 
embrace. Their hold upon us is only strength- 
ened and deepened by the passage of time ; for 



132 



it seems one of the ways by which God would 
make apparent to us the emphasis he lays upon 
childhood that the further we go on in life the 
more indistinct and blurred its middle period be- 
comes, but the more denned and closely neigh- 
bored the things we did and felt when we were 
boys. Life seems in that particular to be like the 
circumference of a circle, that the longer we 
travel upon it the nearer we come to the point 
from which we started. The more delicate and 
influential reminiscences of which we are just 
now thinking connect themselves with the home's 
interior and with those personal associations and 
ministries which go to form the substance and 
heart of home life. A benediction remains upon 
all the years of a man or woman whose heart is 
printed with lines of grace and sweetness caught 
from scenes enacted in a home dominated by 
motives of love, sacrifice, and piety. The family 
circle may be broken, and many of those who 
composed it may have passed beyond the reach 
of our thought and almost beyond the reach of 
our prayer, but the walls of the heart are still 
hung with the delicate delineations of it all, and 
in our quiet, retrospective moments we yet move 
amid pictures that look down upon us in tender 
concern as with the presence of days and loved 
ones that are gone. 

*** 



133 



IN such seasons of reminiscence we feel in us 
the traces of all those years of care-taking 
and safeguarding through which we were led by 
a father's strength and a mother's ministry, and 
there stay by us the scenes, fresh and new to 
memory as the light and dew of this morning, in 
which father's hand strengthened us and mother's 
love comforted us. We remember how in our 
sickness we were then taken care of, and the 
elements of the scene group themselves so un- 
biddenly and easily that if only the voice that 
has been so long still could be heard we should 
certainly think we were a child again. We re- 
member where our mother sat and how she looked 
as she aided us in our lessons, as she toned our 
inflections and corrected our gestures in prepara- 
tion for "speaking our piece" at the village 
school, and the way she tied our tippet as we 
rushed out into the cold and snow. Very distinct 
and warm and cheery still is the picture with 
which we are inlaid of the long, snug, homy win- 
ter evenings, when the work had been finished for 
the day, the " chores " done, with nothing existing 
in all the world but father, mother, and us children. 
There is nothing peculiar in all this experience. 

We all of us put into these lines the like mean- 
ing gleaned by each from our own separate ex- 
perience, and it is just because the experience is 
one in which we all share that the matter becomes 



134 



so mighty and serious. We never quite get away 
from our first years; they not only make out a 
part of the men and women that we are to-day, 
but they are still present to our regard with the 
potency of an instant fact. Reminiscence is such 
a faculty that it rubs out the times that have 
intervened, and blends into a single round and 
transparent drop the day that is gone and the 
day that is here. Reminiscence makes us little 
even when we are old, and helps to keep us pure 
and fresh with the springtime that was in us a 
score or a generation of years ago. A boy can 
never become utterly bad so long as there remains 
with him a memory of his father and mother in 
the act and attitude of prayer. The time may 
come, with the hardening and chilling process of 
the years, when he will himself cease to pray, 
but from the canvas long ago painted there will 
never fade the figures of those, now asleep, whose 
heads were seen day by day bent in humble, 
confiding worship, and who in inspired priestli- 
ness laid the morning sacrifice upon the family 
altar; and the memory of father's and mother's 
prayer helps, at any rate, to keep alive in us our 
own possibilities of prayer. 



THE most natural years of our lives we live 
while we are children, and there is always 



i35 



rest and purification in getting back into touch 
with them. When the burdens press a little 
heavily, and the future is thick with uncertainties, 
the wish will sometimes shape itself that we might 
be back again among our free, fresh, childish 
days. We do not understand it very well, but 
there is something gone that we would dearly 
love to have back. Those may seem to have 
been rather unproductive afternoons that we used 
to spend up in the garret, listening, in the pauses 
of our merrymaking, to the rain pattering on the 
roof, and we so dry and sheltered underneath, 
but our life means more even to-day because of 
them and because of our memory of them. Old 
King David, hiding from the Philistines down 
in the cave of Adullam, had just such plaintive 
reminiscences. In his rocky retreat he had time 
to remember his Bethlehem days, a*nd the flocks 
and the folds, and his boyhood and the delicious 
exemptions of it, and the spring at which while a 
boy he quenched his eager thirst, and he cried, 
" Oh that one would give me drink of the water 
of the well of Bethlehem, which is by the gate ! " 
We love in this way to think our way back into 
the past, because we feel that some of the dew 
has evaporated from the leaves while the day 
has been moving toward its nooning. It quiets 
us, too, for it works in us a feeling of trustful 
dependence as we live over the unanxious days 



36 



when we were boys and girls. Children are like 
the birds : they expect to be taken care of. There 
is no sleep like the child's sleep: with him the 
day reaches as far as to the pillow, and then the 
night begins. Children have their little burdens, 
but they lay them by with their garments. They 
go to sleep with a smile and wake up with a 
laugh, for they expect to be taken care of. There 
are many men with hoary heads that would part 
with a good deal of their fortune if they could 
have just one more night when mother would 
come up, as of old, and the dear hands, that have 
so long rested from their ministry, would tuck the 
clothes about them, commit the dear child to 
God's good care for the night, and seal the 
prayer with her kiss. 

It is one of the tender features of creative 
wisdom that we enter life through the little 
wicket-gate of childhood, and that childhood 
can be so fragrant as to sweeten with its perfume 
all the years into which it ripens and mellows. 



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